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LONGMANS' ENGLISH CLASSICS 

EDITED BY 

ASHLEY H. THORNDIKE, Ph.D., L.H.D. 

PEOFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 



WALDEN 



longmans' (Sngligb Claggtcs 
THOREAU'S 

WALDEN 



EDITED 

WITH NOTES AND AN INTRODUCTION 
BY 

RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN, Ph.D. 

ASSOCIATE PKOFESSOR OF ENGLISH, LELAND STANFORD JUNIOB 
UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
1910 






\ 



Copyright, 1910 

BY 

LOxNTGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 



THE SCIENTIFIC PRESS 

ROBERT DRDMMOND AND COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



(^CI.A^65887 



o 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction ix 

BiBUOGRAPHY xviii 

Chronological Table. xix 

WALDEN: 

CHAPTER 

I. Economy 3 

II. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For 68 

III. Reading 83 

IV. Sounds 93 

V. Solitude 108 

\i. Visitors 116 

VII. The Beanfield 129 

VIII. The Village 139 

IX. The Ponds 144 

X. Baker Farm 166 

XI. Higher Laws 173 

XII. Brute Neighbors 183 

XIII. House-warming 195 

XIV. Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors 20S 

XV. Winter Animals 220 

XVI. The Pond in Winter 229 

XVII. Spring 242 

XVIII. Conclusion 258 

Notes 271 

V 



INTRODUCTION. 

Henry Thoreau was a man of whom there is little 
that is significant to know which cannot be found in his 
chief book, Walden. From the worldly- standpoint his 
life was wholh^ uneventful, even the publication of 
his writings causing little comment at the time. He was 
born, lived, and died in Concord, Massachusetts, the 
friend and associate of the great men of his time who 
lived there, notably Emerson. He went to Harvard 
College, being graduated in 1837; taught school for a 
time; assisted his father in the manufacture of plumbago 
and pencils (a few of the pencils still survive in Massachu- 
setts, stamped ''Thoreau and Son"); worked as surveyor 
when he was in need of money; gave occasional lectures 
in the popular "lyceums" of the day; and read and wrote 
abundantly, but not at all in the manner or for the pur- 
poses of a professional literary man. For the most part 
he sought only to live, in a spiritually rich sense, and it 
has been truly said that His " was a life in which the pick- 
ing up of an arrow-head or the discovery of a richer 
blueberry patch were events, and the election of a new 
President but an incident." When statistics concerning 
his college class were being gathered, ten years after 
graduation, Thoreau replied to the questions asked : 

"Am not married. I don't know whether mine is a 
profession, or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned 
... I am a Schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor, 
a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I mean a House Painter), 
a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencilmaker, 
a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poet- 
aster. ... I have found out a way to live without what 
is commonly called employment or industry, attractive 
or otherwise. Indeed, my steadiest employment, if 
such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my 
condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven 
or on earth.'' 



¥iii INTRODUCTION. 

Thoreau's literary work is composed of the two books 
published in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and 
Merrimack Rivers (1S49), and Walden, or Life in the Woods 
(1S54), and of various papers which he contributed to 
periocUcals; these last, together with portions of his 
journals and correspondence, were made into books after 
his death. The whole fills some dozen volumes, but the 
method and spirit of all that Thoreau said were so stead- 
fast and simple that to know one of the volumes, one 
might say, is to know the rest. They contain many 
thoughts drawn from Thoreau's reading, which covered 
as wide a range as that of any American of his time; they 
also echo some of the teachings of the " Concord philos- 
ophers," Emerson and Bronson Alcott, of whom Thoreau 
was a friend and — to some extent — a disciple; but 
chiefly they contain his own thoughts " on man, on nature, 
and on human life," and from that standpoint are among 
the most original writings of their age. 

There are two chiefly significant aspects of these writ- 
ings, and the first is their connection with nature. •» Tho- 
reau's love of the out-door world and all its creatures 
perhaps impressed his friends more than any other char- 
acteristic. Bronson Alcott wrote of him: 

" I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly 
of the country, and so purely a son of nature. I think 
he had the profoundest passion for it of any one of his 
time. . . . He seemed one with things, of nature's essence 
and core, knit of strong timbers, — like a wood and its 
mhabitants. There was in him sod and shade, wilds 
and waters manifold, — the mold and mist of earth and 
sky. . . . He, of all men, seemed to be the native New 
Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge; our 
best sample of an indigenous American, untouched by 
the old country, unless he came down rather from Thor 
the Northman, whose name he bore." 

So it was his occupation, not his recreation, to roam 
the open country, never using the railroad or other 
artificial means of locomotion if he could help it, and 
to find in almost every foot of ground something worth 
seeing and remembering. 

"He knew the country like a fox or a bird," wrote 



INTRODUCTION. is 

Emerson, ''and passed through it as freely by paths of 
his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the 
ground, and what creature had taken this path before 
him. . . . On the day I speak of he looked for the Men- 
yanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examina- 
tion of the florets, decided that it had been in flower five 
days. He drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and 
read the names of all the plants that should bloom on 
this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his 
notes fall due. The Cypripedium not due till to-morrow. 
He thought that, if waked up from a trance in this swanip, 
he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was 
within two days. . . . His power of observation seemed 
to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, 
heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photo- 
graphic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none 
knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, 
but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. 
Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a tj'pe of the order 
and beauty of the whole." 

From this standpoint, then, Walden is one of the few 
great books which are especially valued for their power 
of communicating the richness of the flavor of the world 
of nature. 

But by "nature," when Thoreau is concerned, we must 
understand not merely the landscape and its creatures, 
but natural living, as contrasted with the complex and 
artificial life of society. Many of us like to free ourselves 
from the bustle and trappings of civilization for a few 
days' outing, but Thoreau honestly and consistently 
wished to do so all the time. He not only enjoyed "the 
simple life," but he believed in it, and proclaimed: "A 
man is rich in proportion to the number of things which 
he can afford to let alone." So to him " life in the woods " 
was typical of freedom from the drudgery, the blind money- 
getting and moncj'-spending, of the great part of mankind. 
And after thinking a good while about the things that 
one "can afford to let alone," he put his theories to the 
test by building a little hut on the shore of Walden Pond, 
and living in it for some two years. (See the text itself 
for an account' of what the cxrjerinient cost him, and the 



X INTRODUCTION. 

proportionate time which he saved for more important 
things than earning money.) "I went to the woods 
because I wished to hve deliberately, to front only the 
essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it 
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that 
I had not lived. ... I wanted to live deep, and suck 
out all the marrow of life." The book W olden is not 
only the record of his experiment, but the evidence of 
what he found ^' the marrow of life " to be. 

This brings us to the second of the significant aspects 
of Thoreau's work. Besides being a great naturalist, 
he was a great idealist. Far more than most men, he 
valued and loved both the world of things and the world 
of ideas. He found in himself, he said, "an instinct 
toward a higher, or as it is named, spiritual life, and 
another toward a primitive, rank and savage one: and I 
reverence them both." So his thoughts roamed from 
the fishes and the pebbles in Walden Pond to the deepest 
recesses of the mind, and in both directions he found 
happiness. "While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, 
I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me." Ancl 
he bade others test their happiness by their relation to 
nature: "If the day and the night arc such that you 
greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers 
and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more 
immortal — that is your success." But in such sayings 
he was of course not referring chiefly to the physical side 
of life; that was only a means to the life of the spirit. 
As truly as any man who ever lived, Thoreau believed 
that "the life is more than meat, and the body than 
raiment." And he persistently looked at human activ- 
ities from this ideal standpoint. If his doctrines appeared 
only in what he wrote for pul^lication, it might be thought 
that he was posing — as some did think, in his lifetime. 
But his letters show the same ideas everywhere. In 
1857, after a general financial panic, he wrote to a 
friend : 

"The merchants and company have long laughed at 
transcendentalism [on the meaning of this word, see page 
xiv], higher laws, etc., crying ' None of your moonshine,' 
as if they were anchored to something not only definite. 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

but sure and permanent. If there was any institution 
which was presumed to rest on a solid and secure basis, 
and more than any other represented this boasted com- 
mon sense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the 
bank; and now those very banks are found to be mere 
reeds shaken by the wind. Scarcely one in the land has 
kept its promise. . . . But there is the moonshine still, 
serene, beneficent, unchanged." 

This passage may well be compared with the defence 
of ideals in the closing pages of W olden: ^' If one advances 
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors 
to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with 
a success unexpected in common hours. ... If you have 
built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that 
is where they should be. Now put the foundations under 
them." No better word than this has been spoken to 
youth by any American writer. 

But it must be said that, despite the nobility and 
purity of Thoreau's thinking, it can hardly be taken as a 
safe guide. In his concern for individual freedom, he 
never sufficiently regarded man's place and duties in 
organized society, and a portion of his teaching reads 
like the expression of a kind of exalted selfishness; — com- 
pare, for example, his rather scornful references to 
"Doing-good" and ''philanthropy," in the closing pages 
of the first chapter. From such sayings one must sub- 
tract something, because of his love of paradox and 
exaggeration; the same sjDirit that led him to say, "I 
could easily do without the post-office. I think that there 
are very few important communications made through 
it," or, when he wished to urge the younger generation 
to act on its own best impulses, to utter this absurdity: 
" I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have 
yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my 
seniors." Such utterances he himself explained, in the 
Conclusion to Walden, saying: "I fear chiefly lest my 
expression may not be extra-vagant enough. ... I desire 
to speak somewhere without bounds, for I am convinced 
that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the founda- 
tion of a true expression." But no allowance for exaggera- 
tion will enable one to feel that Thoreau could ever have 



xii INTRODUCTION. 

worked much with other men for the good of the 
community. 

As an individual, however, he was deeply interested 
in certain public questions. On account of his disap- 
proval of the Mexican War he refused to pay his poll- 
tax, and in 1845 was arrested and imprisoned for this 
refusal. (See page 142, and the note on it.) Later he 
proposed similar action for those who wished to protest 
against slavery, saying, ''Under a government which 
imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is 
also a prison." From the same standpoin the admired and 
befriended the revolutionary abolitionist, John Brown, 
when he came to Concord; and when, in 1859, Brown 
was about to be executed for his daring raid at Harper's 
Ferr}'-, it was Thoreau who gathered his fellow-citizens 
together at Concord, and read them a ringing address in 
honor of the man who had so conspicuously represented 
his own principle of ''civil disobedience." But with 
ordinary, orderly matters of social good he had little 
concern; and in the thrilling days of 18G1 we find him 
writing to a friend: " I do not so much regret the present 
condition of things in this country as I do that 1 ever 
heard of it. I know one or two who have this year, for 
the first time, read a President's Message; but they do 
not see that this implies a fall in themselves rather than 
a rise in the President. Blessed were the days before 
you read a President's Message. Blessed are they who 
never read a newspaper." 

Thoreau's criticism of life, then, is valuable chiefl}^ in 
a negative way. For those who feel that they are social 
beings, and must live in cooperation with othei-s, he has 
little positive advice. But he strikes splendid blows 
at the stupidity and wastefulness of many men's lives, 
and such scorn is ennobling. "I have seen more men 
than usual, lately," he writes (in a letter of Aug. 8, 1854), 
"and well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised 
to find what vulgar fellows they are. They do a little 
business commonly each day, in order to pay their board, 
and then they congregate in sitting-rooms and feebly 
fabulate and paddle in the social slush; and when I think 
that they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared ta 



INTRODUCTION. xiii 

see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed 
to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth." The 
salty vigor of this is more like Carlyle's than it is like any 
American writer, and often Thoreau's virile satire sug- 
gests the temper of Carlyle rather than that of Emerson, 
with whom he is more commonly associated. 

The strictly literary value of his work is very uneven. 
He wrote freely and unsystematically, as he thought and 
lived, not seeking to order his material carefully, or to 
build up the structure of his thought in the manner of 
one who really tries to prove something. Sometimes 
he will linger and amble when we would wish to go 
more speedily.* But aside from these things, Thoreau's 
style is singularly rich aijd rewarding. He studs his 
writing with gems from every quarter of literature, so 
that to understand all his allusions might be said to be 
a liberal education. His moral earnestness at times has 
a dignity quite the equal of Emerson's, and flashes out 
in the same sort of noble, compact utterances. ''The 
morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is 
uninterrupted." "God himself culminates in the present 
moment, and will never be more divine." "There is 
more day to dawn; the sun is but a morning star." On 
the other hand, his humor is far more ready and abundant 
than his friend's. " I retained the landscape, and I have 
annually carried off what it yielded without a wheel- 
barrow." " We are in great haste to construct a magnetic 
telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, 
it may be, have nothing important to communicate." 
Or, compare the account of Circulating Library novels 
in Chapter III, or the delicious contrast, in Chapter V, 
between Thoreau going comfortal)ly to bed in his hut 
and the prosperous farmer driving cattle to market 
through the darkness and the mud, in order to enjoy 
"the comforts of life." Sometimes he will revel in a bit 
of pure verbal melody, like the old seventeenth-century 



* Walden is certainly longer than it need be. Those who prefer 
to read less than the whole may be advised to include the first five 
chapters, and perhaps the eighth, eleventh, sixteenth, and 
eighteenth, for the rest — by no means omitting the last. 



xiv INTRODUCTION. 

writers whom he knew and loved; such is the beautiful 
close of the sixteenth chapter, where the Walden water is 
followed "past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis 
and the Hesperides," till it "makes the periplus of Hanno, 
and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of 
the Persian gull, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian 
seas." And sometimes, again, there is a masterly bit 
of narrative or description, which may be taken out and 
made to stand by itself as a work of art in miniature. 
Such is the Battle of the Ants, in Chapter XII, for narra- 
tion; and, for description, the splendid picture of the 
old fisherman in the Week on the Concord and Merrimack, 
too good not to be quoted here: 

"I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads 
and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old 
country method — for youth and age then went a fishing 
together — full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance 
about his own Tyne and Northuml^erland. He was 
always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, 
and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny 
hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost 
grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat 
or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen 
through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval 
fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I 
thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and 
I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down 
with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under 
his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think 
nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, 
for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. 
His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of sub- 
sistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal 
from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles." 

Certain aspects of Thoreau's work cannot be under- 
stood without remembering his connection with the 
group of New England " Transcendcntalists " who 
exerted an important influence on American thought 
and literature in the 40's of the nineteenth century. 
Transcendentalism may be ]:)riefly defined as the belief 
that there are sources of knowledge which transcend — 



INTRODUCTION. xv 

that is, are of higher origin than — the five senses and the 
common reason; that the spirit of man may l<now certain 
truths through its very nature, or through communica- 
tion with the divine spirit (see the passage on Brahma, 
page 81, and the note on it). Consistently with this idea, 
all the writers of the group — notably Emerson, Alcott, 
and Thoreau — will be found to state many teachings 
which they make no attempt to prove, but which they 
conceive will appeal as true to the right perceptions of 
those addressed. We must not think of the group as 
forming any definite organization, or even a systematic 
"school" of thought; on the contrary, it was of the very 
nature of their beliefs that every man should think for 
himself. This freedom of individual thought found many 
different expressions, from the most noble to the most 
absurd. Reforms in matters of eating, clothing, and 
social and political organization, were everywhere "in 
the air." James Russell Lowell described the more 
amusing aspect of the times: "Bran had its apostles, 
and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs. . . . 
Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money 
(unless earned by other people), professing to live on 
the internal revenues of the spirit. . . . Communities 
were established where everything was to be common 
but common-sense." While Emerson gave this account, 
in 1840, of its deeper aspect: 

"No one can converse much with different classes of 
society in New England without remarking the progress 
of a revolution. Those who share in it have no external 
organization, no badge, no creed, no name. They do 
not vote, or print, or even meet together. They do not 
know each other's faces or names. They are united only 
in a common love of truth and love of its work. . . . They 
have silently given in their several adherence to a new 
hope, and in all companies do signify a greater trust in 
the nature and resources of man than the laws or the 
popular opinions will well allow." 

An important representative of this movement was the 
magazine called The Dial, which was published quarterly 
from 1840 to 1844 under the editorship, first of 5largaret 
Fuller, then of Emerson. To this Thoreau was a leading 



xvi INTRODUCTION. 

contributor, and indeed for a brief period acted as editor. 
More of his poems v/ere published here than elsewhere 
during his life, and to look through the numbers of The 
Dial is to come into the same atmosphere that pervades 
his writings. One series of articles in the journal is 
particularly significant for readers of Wcdden — the so- 
called "Ethnical Scriptures." All the Concord tran- 
scendentalists had become interested in the ethical and 
religious writings of Asia, — particularly of China and 
India, — some of which had lately become accessible to 
English readers ; for they found in them certain aspects 
of thought which harmonized with their own thinking, 
in ways which cannot be discussed here, and their new 
sense of religious freedom led them to think that these 
"Bibles" of other nations might be as truly worthy of 
study as the Bible of Jews and Christians. In The Dial 
for July, 1S42, occurs this note, probably written by 
Emerson : 

"We commence in the present number the printing 
of a series of selections from the oldest ethical and religious 
writings of men, exclusive of the Hebrew and Greek 
Scriptures. Each nation has its bible more or less pure; 
none has yet been willing or aljle in a wise and devout 
spirit to collate its own with those of other nations, and, 
sinking the civil-historical and the ritual portions, to 
bring together the grand expressions of the moral sentiment 
in different ages and races, the rules for the guidance of 
life, the bursts of piety and of abandonment to the In- 
visible and Eternal; — a work inevitable sooner or later." 

In accordance with this plan the editors reprinted 
extracts from the Hindu "laws of Menu," the Persian 
" Desatir or Regulations," the Chinese "Four Books" 
of Confucius and others, "the Preaching of Buddha," 
and the "Chaldaean Oracles." For a number of these 
articles Thoreau was probably responsible, and it is 
certain that he was deeply interested in the plan. There 
is a story that, when a friend said something to him about 
the Bible, he replied " Which one? " And the reader of 
Walden will sec how consistently he followed up the study 
of these scriptures of other peoples, and illustrated his 
ideas from their writings. Now that these Oriental 



INTRODUCTION. xvii 

writings have been known to the Western world for a 
century, it is pretty clear that Thoreau and his friends 
exaggerated their value, on both the religious and the 
literary side. They are very far from having taken a 
place, among the Christian peoples, by the side of the 
Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. But many of 
their nobler elements have been handed down in modern 
literature, through the influence of Thoreau and Emerson 
— the charm of which is perhaps best exemplified, for 
readers of W olden, by the story of the artist of Kouroo 
(pp. 263-264), surely one of the gems of the book. The 
noble idealism expressed by this little tale is closely akin 
to that which Emerson attributed to his friend in the 
closing words of the sketch he wrote after Thoreau's 
death; and nothing better could be found as a conclusion 
to these introductory pages: 

"There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same 
genus with our summer plant called Life-Everlasting, a 
Gnaphaliiim like that, which grows on the most inac- 
cessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois 
dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by 
its beauty, and by his love (for it is immensely valued 
by the Swiss maidens) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is 
sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his 
hand. It is called ])y botanists the Gnaphaliwn leonto- 
■podiuvi, but by the Swiss Edehveisse, which signifies 
Noble Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope 
to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. 
The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large 
as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for 
his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, 
or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. . . . But 
he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest 
society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities 
of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever 
there is virtue, , wherever there is beauty, he will find a 
home." 



n 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 



Thoreau's collected writings are published in eleven 
volumes in the Riverside Edition (Houghton-Mifflin Co., 
Boston). Emerson's Biographical Sketch of Thoreau 
is included in Volume X, called Miscellanies. It may also 
be found in the original edition (1S63) of the volume 
called Excursions, and in the Cambridge Classics Edition 
of Walden (Houghton-Mifflin Co.). the best extended 
life of Thoreau is that of Henry S. Salt (Walter Scott, 
London), which contains some admirable critical chapters 
and a complete bibliography. William EUery Channing's 
memoir, called Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist (1873), while 
rambling and uneven, contains considerable interesting 
matter; a new edition, with notes by F. B. Sanborn, was 
pubhshed in 1902 (C. E. Goodspeed, Boston). Mr. San- 
born is also the author of the volume on Thoreau in the 
American Men of Letters Series (Houghton-Mifflin Co., 
1SS2) ; its account of the Concord of Thoreau's time is 
more satisfactory than the biographical matter. Other 
interesting accounts of Thoreau, by his contemporaries, 
will be found in Bronson Alcott's Concord Days (1872), 
Moncure Conway's Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882), 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Short Studies of American 
Authors (1888), and Charles J. Woodbury's Talks with 
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890). 

Perhaps the most important critical articles on 
Thoreau's writings are that by James Russell Lowell 
(in My Study Windoivs), which, however, is rather 
lacking in sympathic appreciation; that by John Bur- 
roughs, in Indoor Studies; and that by Robert Louis 
Stevenson in Familiar Studies of Men and Books. For 
other references, see the bibliography in Salt's Ldfe, 
already referred to. There are also good brief critical 
notices of Thoreau in Pancoast's Introduction to American 
Literature (Holt, New York), and Newcomer's American 
Literature (Scott, Foresman & Co., Chicago). 



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'-' 



WALDEN 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 



WALDEN. 



ECONOMY. 

Whex I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk 
of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any 
neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the 
shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and 
earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I 
lived there two years and two months. At present I 
am a sojourner in civilized life again. 

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice 
of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been 
made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, 
which some would call impertinent, though they do not 
appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the 
circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have 
asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; 
if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been 
curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted 
to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, 
how many poor children I maintained. I will there- 
fore ask those of my readers who feel no particular 
interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer 
some of these questions in this book. In most books, 
the /, or first person, is omitted, in this it will be retained ; 
that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We 
commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always 
the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so 
much about myself if there were anybody else whom I 
knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this 
theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, 
I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple 
and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what 



4 WALDEN. 

he has heard of other men's Kves; some such account 
as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; 
for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a dis- 
tant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particu- 
larl}' addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my 
readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. 
I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the 
coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. 

I would fain say something, not so much concerning 
the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders, as you who read 
these pages, who are said to live in New England ; some- 
thing about your condition, especially j'our outward 
condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, 
what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as 
it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I 
have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, 
in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have 
appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand re- 
markable ways. What I have heard of Brahmins 
sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of 
the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads down- 
Avard, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their 
shoulders ''until it becomes impossible for them to re- 
sume their natural position, while from the twist of the 
neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach;" 
or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or 
measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth 
of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of 
pillars, — even these forms of conscious penance are 
hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes 
which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules 
were trifling in comparison with those which my neigh- 
bors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and 
had an end; but I could never see that these men slew 
or captured any monster or finished any labor. They 
have no friend lolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of 
the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, 
two spring up. 

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune 
it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and 
farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than 



ECONOMY. 5 

got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open 
pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have 
seen with clear eyes what field they were called to labor 
in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they 
eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat 
only -his peck of dirt? AVhy should they begin digging 
their graves as soon as they are born? They have got 
to live a man's life, pushing all these things "l3efore them, 
and get on as well as they can. How many a poor im- 
mortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered 
under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing 
before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean 
stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, 
tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot! The portionless, 
who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encum- 
brances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate 
a few cubic feet of flesh. 

But men labor under a mistake. The better part 
of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. 
By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are 
employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures 
which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break 
through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find 
when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said 
that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing 
stones over their heads behind them: — 

Inde genus durum sumus, experien'sque laborum, 
Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati. 

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way, — 

"From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, 
Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are." 

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, 
throwing the stones over their heads behind them, 
not seeing where they fell. 

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, 
through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied 
with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors 
of life, that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. 
Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and 



6 WALDEX. 

tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring 
man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; 
he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; 
his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has 
no time to be anything but a machine. How can he 
remember well his ignorance — which his ' growth re- 
quires — who. has so often to use his knowledge? We 
should feed and clothe him gratuitously someljimes, and 
recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. 
The finest c|ualities of our nature, like the bloom on 
fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate hand- 
ling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another 
thus tenderly. 

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to 
live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I 
have no doubt that some of you who read this book are 
unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actu- 
ally eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast 
w'earing or are already worn out, and have come to this 
page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your 
creditors of an hour. It is very evident wdiat mean and 
sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been 
whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying 
to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very 
ancient slough, called by the Latins ces alienum, another's 
brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still liv- 
ing, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always 
promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and 
dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get 
custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison 
offences; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves 
into a nutshell of civilit}^, or dilating into an atmosphere 
of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade 
your neighbor to let j^ou make his shoes, or his hat, or 
his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; 
making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something 
against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an 
old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, 
more safely, in a brick bank; no matter where, no matter 
how much or how little. 

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I 



ECONOMY. 7 

may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat 
foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there 
are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both 
north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; 
it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all 
when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a 
divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway,^ 
wending to market by day or night; does any divinity 
stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water 
his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with 
the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire 
Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See 
how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he 
fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and 
prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by 
his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant com- 
pared with our own private opinion. What a man 
thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather 
indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West 
Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination, — what 
Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think, also, 
of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against 
the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their 
fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. 

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. 
What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. 
From the desperate city you go into the desj^erate coun- 
try, and have to console yourself with the bravery of 
minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious 
despair is concealed even under what are called the games 
and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, 
for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic 
of wisdom not to do desperate things. 

When we consider what, to use the words of the cate- 
chism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true 
necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had 
deliberately chosen the common mode of living because 
they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly 
think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy 
natures remember that the syn rose clear. It is ne\"er 
too late to give up our prejudices. No way of think- 



8 WALDEN. 

ing or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without 
proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by 
as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, 
mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a 
cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. 
What old people say you cannot do you try and find that 
you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds 
for new. Old people did not know enough once, per- 
chance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new 
people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled 
round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to 
kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly 
so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has 
not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost 
doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute 
value by living. Practically, the old have no very im- 
portant advice to give the young, their own experience 
has been so partial, and their lives have been such miser- 
able failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; 
and it may be that they have some faith left which belies 
that experience, and they are only less young than they 
were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, 
and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or 
even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told 
me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, to 
the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great 
extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that 
they have tried it. If I have any experience which 
I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Men- 
tors said nothing about. 

One farmer says to me, " You cannot live on vegetable 
food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;" 
and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying 
his S3^stem with the raw material of bones, walking all 
the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable- 
made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along 
in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really 
necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and 
diseased, which in others are luxuries merely, and in 
others still are entirely unknown. 

The whole ground of human life seems to some to 



ECONOMY. 9 

have been gone over by their predecessors, both the 
heights and the valleys, and all things to have been 
cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon 
prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; 
and the Koman prsetors have decided how often you 
may go into your neighbor's land to gather the acorns 
which fall on it without trespass, and what share be- 
longs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has even left 
directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even 
with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. 
Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which pre- 
sume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life 
are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have never 
been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can 
do by any precedents, so little has been tried. What- 
ever have been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, 
my child, for who shall assign to thee what thou hast 
left undone?" 

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; 
as, for instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans 
illumines at once a system of earths like ours. If I 
had remembered this it would have prevented some 
mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. 
The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! 
\Miat distant and different beings in the various man- 
sions of the universe are contemplating the same one 
at the same moment! Nature and human life are as 
various as our several constitutions. Who shall say 
what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater 
miracle take place than for us to look through each other's 
eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of 
the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. 
History, Poetry, Mythology! — I know of no reading of 
another's experience so startling and informing as this 
would be. 

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I 
believe in my soul to be bad, and if I 'repent of anything, 
it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon 
possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the 
wisest thing you can, old man, — you. who have lived 
seventy yearsj not without honor of a kind, — I hear an 



10 WALDEX. 

irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. 
One generation abandons the enterprises of another like 
stranded vessels. 

I think that we may safel}^ trust a good deal more 
than we do. We may waive just so much care of our- 
selves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as 
well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The 
incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh in- 
curable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate 
the importance of what work we do; and yet how much 
is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? 
How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith 
if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night 
we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves 
to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we 
compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the 
possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; 
l3ut there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii 
from one centre. All change is a miracle to contem- 
plate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every 
instant. Confucius said, "To know that we know what 
we know, and that we do not know what we do not 
know, that is true knowledge." When one man has 
reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his 
understanding, I foresee that all men will at length 
establish their lives on that basis. 

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble 
and anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how 
much it is necessary that we be troubled, or, at least, 
careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive 
and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward 
civilization, if only to learn what are the gross neces- 
saries of life and what methods have been taken to ob- 
tain them; or even to look over the old day-books of 
the merchants, to see what it was that men most com- 
monly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, 
what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements 
of ages have had but little influence on the essential 
laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are 
not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. 



ECONOMY. 11 

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of 
all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been 
from the first, or from long use has become, so important 
to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, 
or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without 
it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one 
necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is 
a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; 
unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the moun- 
tain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires 
more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life 
for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be 
distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, 
Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these 
are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life 
with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has in- 
vented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food; 
and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth 
of fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, 
arose the present necessity to sit by it. We observe 
cat? and clogs acquiring the same second nature. By 
proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our 
own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of 
Fuel, that is, with an external heat greater than our 
own internal, may not cookery properly be said to begin? 
Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Terra 
del Fuego that, while his own party, who were well 
clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too 
warm, these naked savages, who were farther off, were 
observed, to his great surprise, ''to be streaming with 
perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we 
are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, 
while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it im- 
possible to combine the hardiness of these savages with 
the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to 
Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which 
keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In 
cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal 
heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease 
and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want 
of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes 



12 WALDEN. 

out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded 
with fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, there- 
fore, from the above list, that the expression, animal 
life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal 
heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which 
keeps up the fire within us, — and Fuel serves only to 
prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our 
bodies by addition from without, — Shelter and Clothing 
also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and 
absorbed. 

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies is to keep 
warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we 
accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, 
and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night- 
clothes, rob])ing the nests and breasts of birds to pre- 
pare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its 
bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The 
poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; 
and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly 
a great part of our ails. The summer, in some cUmates, 
makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, 
except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun 
is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked 
by its rays; while Food generally is more various, and 
more easily olDtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly 
or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this 
country, as I find my own experience, a few imple- 
ments, a knife, an axe, a spade, a wheelbarrow, &c., 
and for the studious, lamplight, stationer}', and access 
to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all 
be obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go 
to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy 
regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty 
years, in order that they may live, — that is, keep com- 
fortably warm, — and die in New England at last. The 
luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm 
but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, 
of course a la mode. 

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called com- 
forts, of life are not only not indispensable, bvit positive 
hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect 



ECONOMY. 13 

to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a 
more simple and meagre life than the poor. The an- 
cient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and 
Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer 
in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We know 
not much about them. It is remarkable that loe know- 
so much of them as we do. The same is true of the 
more modern reformers and benefactors of their race. 
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life 
but from the vantage ground of what we should call 
volun+ar}- poverty. Of a life of luxury the fruit is 
luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, 
or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, 
but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess 
because.it wa; once admirable to live. To be a philos- 
opher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even 
to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, ac- 
cording to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, 
magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the 
problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. 
The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly 
a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They 
make shift to live merely by conformity, practically 
as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors 
of a nobler race of men. But why do men degenerate 
ever? What makes families run out? What is the nature 
of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? 
Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? 
The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the 
outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, 
warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be 
a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better 
methods than other men? 

When a man is warmed by the several modes which 
I have described, what does he want next? Surely not 
more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, 
larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant 
clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, 
and the like. When he has obtained those things which 
are necessary to life, there is another alternative than 
to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life 



14 WALDEN. 

now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. 
The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent 
its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot up- 
ward also with conficlence. Why has man rooted him- 
self thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the 
same proportion into the heavens above? — for the nobler 
plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the 
air and light, far from the ground, and are not treated 
like the humbler esculents, which, though the}' may be 
biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected 
their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so 
that most would not know them in their flowering season. 
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and val- 
iant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether 
in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnifi- 
cently and spend more lavishly than the richest, with- 
out ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how 
they live, — if, indeed, there are any such, as has been 
dreamed; nor to those who find their encouragement 
and inspiration in precisely the present condition of 
things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm 
of lovers, — and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this 
number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, 
in whatever circumstances, and they know whether 
they are well emplo3'ed or not; — but mainly to the mass 
of men who are discontented, and idly complaining 
of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they 
might improve them. There are some who complain 
most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they 
are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my 
mind that seemingly wealthy but most terribly im- 
poverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, 
bvit know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus 
have forged their own golden or silver fetters. 

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to 
spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise 
those of my readers who are somewhat acciuainted with 
its actual history; it would certainly astonish those 
who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some 
of the enterprises which I have cherished. 



ECONOMY. 15 

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have 
been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch 
it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two 
eternities, the past 'and future, which is precisely the 
present moment; to toe that hne. You will pardon 
some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade 
than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but 
inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell 
all that I know about it, and never paint ''No Admit- 
tance" on my gate. 

1 long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle- 
dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the trav- 
ellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their 
tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met 
one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp 
of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind 
a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them 
as if the}'- had lost them themselves. 

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, 
but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, 
summer and winter, before yet an}' neighbor was stir- 
ring about his business, have I been al)Out mine! No 
doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning 
from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the 
iTwilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is 
true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, 
but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be 
present at it. 

So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside 
the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear 
and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital 
in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running 
in the face of it. If it had concerned either of the political 
parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the 
Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times 
watching from the observatory of some cliff or tree, 
to telegraph any new arrival; or waiting at evening on 
the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I might catch some- 
thing, though I never caught much, and that, manna- 
wise, would dissolve again in the sun. 

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no 



16 WALDEN. 

veiy wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen 
fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too 
common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. 
However, in this case my pains were their own reward. 

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of 
snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faith- 
fully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths 
and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines 
bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public 
heel had testified to their utility. 

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which 
give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leap- 
ing fences, and I have had an eye to the unfrequented 
nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always 
know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular 
field to-day; that was none of my business. I have 
watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the 
nettle tree, the red pine ancl the black ash, the white 
grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered 
else in dry seasons. 

In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may say 
it without boast'ng, faithfully minding my business, 
till it became more and more evident that my towns- 
men would not after all admit me into the list of town 
officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate 
allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have 
kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still 
less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I 
have not set my heart on that. 

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell bas- 
kets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neigh- 
borhood. "Do you wish to buy any baskets?" he 
asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. 

"What!" exclaimed the Indian, as he went out the 
gate, "do you mean to starve us?" Having seen his 
industrious white neighl^ors so well off, — that the law- 
yer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic 
wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself: 
I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a 
thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made 
the baskets he would have done his part, and then it 



ECONOMY. 17 

would bo tho white man's to buy them. He had not 
discovered that it was necessary for him to make it 
worth the other's while to buy them, or at least make him 
think that it was so, or to make something else which 
it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven 
a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not 
made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not 
the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to 
weave them, and instead of studying how to make it 
worth men's while to buy m}^ baskets, I studied rather 
how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life 
which men praise and regard as successful is but one 
kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the 
expense of the others? 

Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to 
offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or 
living anywhere else, ])ut I must shift for myself, I turned 
my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where 
I was better known. I determined to go into business 
at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using 
such slender means as I had already got. My purpose 
in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to 
live deai-ly there, but to transact some private business 
with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplish- 
■ ing which for want of a little common sense, a little 
enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as 
foolish. 

I have always endeavored to accjuire strict business 
habits; they are indispensable to everj^ man. If your 
trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small 
counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, 
will be fixture enough. You will export such articles 
as the country affords, purely native products, much ice 
and pine timber and a little granite, always in native 
bottoms. These will be good ventures. To oversee 
all the details yourself in person; to be at once pilot 
and captain, and owner and underwriter; to lauy and 
sell and keep the accounts; to read every letter received, 
and write or read every letter sent; to superintend the 
discharge of imports night and day; to be upon many 
parts of the coast almost at the same time; — often the 



18 WALDEN. 

lichcst freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore; — 
to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the 
horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise; 
to keep up a steady despatch of commodities, for the 
supply of such a distant and exorbitant market; to 
keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, 
prospects of war and peace every w^here, and anticipate 
the tendencies of trade and civilization, — taking advan- 
tage of the results of all exploring expeditions, using new 
passages and all improvements in navigation; — charts 
to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and 
buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the loga- 
rithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of some 
calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that 
should have reached a friendly pier, — there is the un- 
told fate of La Perouse; — universal science to be kept 
pace with, studying the lives of all great discoverers and 
navigators, great adventurers and merchants, from 
Hanno and the Pha3nicians down to our day; in fine, 
account of stock to be taken from time to time, to know 
how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of 
a man, — such problems of profit and loss, of interest, 
of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it, as demand 
a universal knowledge. 

I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good • 
place for business, not solely on account of the railroad 
and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may 
not be good policy to divulge; it is a good post and a 
good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled; though 
you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving, 
it is said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice 
in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face 
of the earth. 

As this business was to be entered into without the 
usual capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where 
those means, that will still be indispensable to every 
such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for Cloth- 
ing, to come at once to the practical part of the question, 
perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and 
a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than 



ECONOMY. 19 

by a true utility. Let him who has work to do recollect 
that the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital 
heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover 
nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary 
or important work may be accomplished without add- 
ing to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a 
suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker 
to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing 
a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses 
to hang the clean clothes on. Every da our garments 
become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the im- 
press of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay 
them aside, without such delay and medical appliances 
and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man 
ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch 
in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, 
commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and 
unpatched, clothes than to have a sound conscience. 
But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps the worst 
vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my 
acquaintances by such tests as this; — who could wear 
a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most 
behave as if they believed that their prospects for life 
would be ruined if they should do it. It would be easier 
for them to holsble to town with a broken leg than with 
a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to 
a gentleman's legs, they can be mended; but if a similar 
accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is 
no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly 
respectable, but what is respected. We know but few 
men, a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scare- 
crow in your last shift, you standing shiftless by, who 
would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a corn- 
field the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, 
I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little 
more weather-beaten than when I saw him last. I have 
heard of a dog that barked at every stranger who ap- 
proached his master's premises with clothes on, but was 
easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting 
question how far men would retain their relative rank 
if they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in 



20 WALDEN. 

such a case, tell surely of any compan}' of civilized men, 
wliich belonged to the most respected class? When 
Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the 
world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic 
Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing 
other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet 
the authorities, for she "was now in a civilized country, 
where . . . people are judged of by their clothes." 
Even in our democratic New England towns the acci- 
dental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in 
dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost 
universal respect. But they who yield such respect, 
numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to 
have a missionary sent to them. Besides, clothes in- 
troduced sewing, a kind of work which you may call 
endless; a woman's dress, at least, is never done. 

A man who has at length found something to do will 
not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old 
will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeter- 
minate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they 
have served his valet, — if a hero ever has a valet, — bare 
feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. 
Only they who go to soirees and legislative halls must 
have new coats, coats to change as often as the man 
changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my 
hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; 
will they not? Who ever saw ,his old clothes, — his old 
coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive 
elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow 
it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed 
on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could 
do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that re- 
quire new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. 
If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be 
made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, 
try it in your old clothes. All men want, not some- 
thing to do with, but something to do, or rather some- 
thing to he. Perhaps we should never procure a new 
suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so 
conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we 
feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would 



ECONOMY. 21 

be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting 
season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. 
The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus 
also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its 
wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; 
for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. 
Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, 
and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, 
as well as that of mankind. 

We don garment after garment, as if we grew like 
exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside 
and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis 
or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may 
be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; 
our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular 
integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or 
true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling 
and so destroying the man. I believe that all races 
at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. 
It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can 
lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live 
in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an 
enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, 
walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While 
one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three 
thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices 
really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be 
bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, 
thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a 
dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of 
a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, 
or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where 
is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earn- 
ing, there will not be found wise men to do him rever- 
ence? 

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my 
tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so 
now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she quoted 
an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it 
difficult to get made what I want, simply because she 
cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. 



22 WALDEN. 

When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment 
absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word 
separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that 
I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They 
are related to 7ne, and what authority they may have 
in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am 
inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without 
any more emphasis of the ''they," — "It is true, they 
did not make them so recently, but they do now." Of 
what use this measuring of me if she does not measure 
my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as 
it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship net the 
Graces, nor the Parcse, but Fashion. She spins and 
weaves and cuts with full authorit}-. The head monkey 
at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys 
in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting 
anything quite simple and honest done in this v/orld 
by the help of men. They would have to be passed 
through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old no- 
tions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon 
their legs again, and then there would be some one in 
the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from 
an egg deposited there nobody knows wdien, for not even 
fire kills these things, and you would have lost your 
labor. Nevertheless we will not forget that some Egyptian 
wheat was handed down to us Id}^ a inummy. 

On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained 
that dressing has in this or any country risen to the 
dignity of an art. At present, men make shift to wear 
what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put 
on what they can find on the beach, and at a little dis- 
tance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's 
masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, 
])ut follows religiously the new. We are amused at be- 
holding the costume of Henry VIII., or Queen Elizabeth, 
as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the 
Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or 
grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and 
the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter 
and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin 
be taken with a fit of colic and his trappings will have t 






ECONOMY. 23 

serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit Idv a cannon 
ball, rags are as becoming as purple. 

The childish and savage taste of men and women for 
new patterns keeps how many shaking and sc[uinting 
through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the partic- 
ular figure which this generation re^iuires to-day. The 
manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely 
whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few 
threads more or less of a particular color, the one will 
be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it fre- 
quently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter 
becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing 
is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not 
barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and 
unalterable. 

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best 
mode by which men may get clothing. The condition 
of the operatives is becoming every day more like that 
of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as 
far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, 
not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, 
unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. 
In the long run men hit only what they aim at. There- 
fore, though they should fail immecliately, they had 
better aim at something high. 

As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a neces- 
sary of life, though there are instances of men having 
done without it for long periods in colder countries than 
this. Samuel Laing says that "The Laplander in his 
skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over his head 
and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow 
. . . in a degree of cold which would extinguish the 
life of one exposed to it in any woollen clothing." He 
has seen them asleep thus. Yet he adds, "They are not 
hardier than other people." But, probabl}^ man did 
not live long on the earth without discovering the con- 
venience which there is in a house, the domestic com- 
forts, which phrase may have originally signified the 
satisfactions of the house more than of the family; 
though these must be extremely partial and occasional 



24 WALDEN. 

in those climates where the house is associated in our 
thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and 
two thirds of the year, except for a parasol, is unneces- 
sary. In our climate, in the summer, it was formerly 
almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes 
a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row 
of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified 
that so many times they had camped. Man was not 
made so large limited and robust but that he must seek 
to narrow his world, and wall in a space such as fitted 
him. He was at first bare and out of doors; but though 
this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, 
by daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say 
nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped 
his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe 
himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, 
according to the fable, wore the bower before other 
clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or 
comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of 
the affections. 

We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the 
human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hol- 
low in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world 
again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even 
in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, hav- 
ing an instinct for it. Who does not remember the 
interest with which when young he looked at shelving 
rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural 
yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor 
which still survived in us. From the cave we have 
advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, 
of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of 
boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we 
know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives 
are domestic in more senses than we think. From the 
hearth to the field is a great distance. It would be well 
perhaps if we were to spend more of our daj-s and nights 
without an}' obstruction between us and the celestial 
bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a 
roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in 
caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots. 



ECONOMY. 25 

However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, 
it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, 
lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth 
without a clew, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or 
a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a 
shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot 
Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, 
while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and 
I thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to 
keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my 
living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pur- 
suits, was a question which vexed even more than it 
does now, for unfortunately I am become- somewhat 
callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six 
feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked 
up their tools at night, and it suggested to me that every 
man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a 
dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit 
the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, 
and hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, 
and in his soul be free. This did not appear the worst, 
nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could 
sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you 
got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord 
dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to 
death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious 
box who would not have frozen to death in such a box 
as this. I am far from jesting. Economy is a subject 
which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot 
so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and 
hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once 
made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature 
furnished ready to their hands. Gookin, who was 
superintendent of the Indians subject to the Massachu- 
setts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The best of their 
houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with 
barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons 
when the sap is up, and made into great flakes, with 
pressure of weighty timber, when they are green. . . . 
The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make 
of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and 



26 WALDEN. 

warm, but not so good as the former. . . . Some I 
have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet 
broad. ... I have often lodged in their wigwams, 
and found them as warm as the best English houses." 
He adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined 
within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were 
furnished with various utensils. The Indians had ad- 
vanced so far as to regulate the effect of the wind by a 
mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved by 
a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance con 
structed in a clay or two at most, and taken down and 
put up in a few hours; and every family owned one, or its 
apartment in one. 

In the savage state every fainily owns a shelter aa 
good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and sim- 
pler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds 
when I say that, though the birds of the air have their 
nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their 
wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one 
half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and 
cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number 
of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of 
the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside 
garment of all, become indispensable summer and win 
ter,' which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but 
now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I 
do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring 
compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage 
owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the 
civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot 
afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better 
afford to hire. But, answers one, by merely paying tliis 
tax the poor civilized man secures an abode which is 
a palace compared with the savage's. An annual rent 
of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, these are tha 
country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improve-} 
ments of centuries, spacious apartments, clean painU 
and paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian 
blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, 
and many other things. But how happens it that he 
who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor 



ECONOMY. 27 

civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is 
rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a 
real advance in the condition of man, — and I think that 
it is, though only the wise improve their advantages, — 
it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings 
without making them more costly; and the cost of a 
thing is the amount of what I will call life which is re- 
quired to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long 
run. An average house in this neighborhood costs per- 
haps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will 
take ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he 
is not encuml^ered with a family; — estii^ating the pecu- 
niar}' value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, 
for if some receive more, others receive less; — so that he 
must have spent more than half his life commonly be- 
fore his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to 
pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils. 
Would the savage have been wise to exchange his wig- 
wam for a palace on these terms? 

It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole 
advantage of holding this superfluous property as a 
fund in store against the future, so far as the individual is 
concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses. 
But perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. 
Nevertheless this points to an important distinction 
between the civilized man and the savage; and, no 
doubt, they have designs on us for our benefit, in making 
the life of a civilized people an institution, in which the 
life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in 
order to preserve and perfect that of the race. But I 
wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at 
present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so 
live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any 
of the disadvantage. What mean ye by saying that the 
poor ye have always with you, or that the fathers have 
eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge? 

"As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occa- 
sion any more to use this proverb in Israel." 

"Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, 
so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth 
it shall die." 






28 WALDEN. 

When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, 
who are at least as well off as the other classes, I find 
that for the most part they have been toiling twenty, 
thirty^ or forty years, that they may become the real 
owners of their farms, which commonly they have in- 
herited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired 
money, — and we may regard one third of that toil as 
the cost of their houses, — but commonly they have not 
paid for them yet. It is true, the encumbrances some- 
times outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm 
itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is 
found to inherif it, being well acquainted with it, as he 
says. On applying to the assessors, I am surprised to 
learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town 
who own their farms free and clear. If you would know 
the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank 
where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually 
paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every 
neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three 
such men in Concord. What has been said of the mer- 
chants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven 
in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farm- 
ers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of 
them says pertinently that a great part of their failures 
are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures 
to fulfil their engagements, because it is inconvenient; 
that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. 
But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, 
and suggests, besides, that probably not even the other 
three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance 
bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. 
Bankruptcy and repudiation are the spring-boards from 
which much of our civilization vaults and turns its 
somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank 
of famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here 
with eclat annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural 
machine were suent. ^ 

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of 
a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the 
problem itself. To get his shoestrings he speculates 
in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he has set 



ECONOMY, 29 

his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and inde- 
pendence, and then, as he turned away, got his own 
leg into it. This is the reason he is poor; and for a sim- 
ilar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage 
comforts, though surrounded by luxuries. As Chapman 
sings : — 

" The false society of men — 

— for earthly greatness 
All heavenly comforts rarefies to air." 

And when the farmer has got his house, he may not 
be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house 
that has got him. As I understand it, that was a valid 
objection urged by Momus against the house which 
Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, 
by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided;" 
and it may still be urged, for our houses are such un- 
wieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather 
than housed in them; and the bad neighborhood to be 
avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two 
families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a genera- 
tion, have been wishing to sell their houses in the out- 
skirts and move into the village, but have not been 
able to accomplish it, and only death wall set them free. 

Granted that the majority are able at last either to 
own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. 
While civilization has been improving our houses, it 
has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit 
them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy 
to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's 
pursuits are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed 
the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries 
and comforts merely, why should we have a better dwelling 
than the former? 

But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will 
be found that just in proportion as some have been 
placed in outward circumstances above the savage, 
others have been degraded below him. The luxury 
of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of 
another. On the one side is the palace, on the other 
are the almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who 



30 WALDEN. 

built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were 
fed on garhc, and it may be were not decently buried 
themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of 
the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so 
good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in 
a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, 
the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants 
may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to 
the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To 
know this I should not need to look farther than to the 
•shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that 
last improvement in civilization; where I see in my 
daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter 
with an open door, for the sake of light, without any 
visible, often imaginable, wood pile, and the forms of 
both old and young are permanently contracted by the 
long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the 
development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. 
It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor 
the works which distinguish this generation are accom- 
plished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the 
condition of the operatives of every denomination in 
England, which is the great workhouse of the world. 
Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one 
of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Con- 
trast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the 
North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or 
any other savage race before it was degraded by con- 
tact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that 
that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized 
Tulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness 
may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer. now 
to the laborers of our Southern States who produce the 
staple exports of this country, and are themselves a staple 
production of the South. But to confine myself to 
those who are said to be in moderate circumstances. 

Most men appear never to have considered what a 
house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all 
their lives because they think that they must have such 
a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear 
any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, 



ECOXOMY. 31 

or, gradually leaving off palmlcaf hat. or cap of wood- 
chuck skin, complain of hard times because he could 
not afford to buy him a crown! It is possible to invent 
a house still more convenient and luxurious than Wc have^ 
which yet all would admit that man could not afford to 
pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these 
things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall 
the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept 
and example, the necessity of the young man's provid- 
ing a certain number of superfluous glowshoes, and 
umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, 
before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as 
simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I think of 
the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized 
as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to 
man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, 
any car-load of fashional^le furniture. Or what if I 
were to allow — would it not be a singular allowance? — 
that our furniture should be more complex than the 
Arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually 
his superiors! At present our houses are cluttered and 
defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out 
the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave 
her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the 
blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should 
be man's morning work in this world? I had three pieces 
of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that 
they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture 
of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out 
the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a 
furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for 
no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has 
broken ground. 

It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions 
which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who 
stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, 
for the republicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, 
and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he 
w^ould soon be completely emasculated. I think that in 
the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury 
than on safety and convenience, and it threatens with- 



32 , WALDEN. 

out attaining these to become no better than a modern 
drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun- 
shades, and a hundred other Oriental things, which we 
are taking west with us, invented for the kxdies of the 
harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, 
which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names 
of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to 
myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would 
rather ride on earth in an ox cart with free circulation, 
than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train 
and breathe a malaria all the way. 

The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in 
the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that 
they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he 
was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his 
journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this 
world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing 
the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. But lo! 
men have become the tools of their tools. The man 
who independently plucked the fruits when he was 
hungry is become a farmer: and he who stood under a 
tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer 
camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and 
forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely 
as an improved method of agr?-i-culture. We have built 
for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family 
tomb. The best works of art are the expression of 
man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but 
the effect of our art is merely to make this low state 
comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There 
is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, 
if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our 
houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. 
There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to 
receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider 
how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, 
and their internal economy managed and sustained, I 
wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor 
while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantle-piece, 
and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and 
honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but per- 



ECONOMY. 33 

ceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing 
jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the 
fine ai-ts which adorn it, my attention being wholly 
occupied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest 
genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record is 
that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have 
cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. Without 
factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again 
beyond that distance. The first question which I am 
tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impro- 
priety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninety- 
seven who fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me 
these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your 
baubles and find them ornamental. The cart before 
the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we 
can adorn om' houses with Ijeautiful objects the walls 
must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and 
beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for 
a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most 
cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no 
housekeeper. 

Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," 
speaking of the first settlers of this town, with whom 
he was contemporary, tells us that "they burrow them- 
selves in the earth for their first shelter under some 
hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they 
make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest 
side." They did not "provide them houses," says he^ 
"till the earth, by the Lord's blessing, brought forth 
bread to feed them," and the first year's crop was so 
light that " they were forced to cut their bread very thin 
for a long season." The secretary of the Province of 
New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650, for the in- 
formation of those who wished to take up land there, 
states more particularly, that "those in New Netherland, 
and especially in New England, who have no means to 
build farm houses at first according to their wishes, dig 
a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven 
feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case 
the earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line 
the wood with the bark of trees or something else to pre- 



34 WALDEN. 

vent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with 
plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, rais« a 
roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark 
or green sods, so that they can live dry and warm in 
these houses with their entire families for two, three, 
and four years, it being understood that partitions are 
run through those cellars, which are adapted to the size 
of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New 
England, in the Ijeginning of the colonies, commenced 
their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons: 
firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and not to 
want food the next season; secondly, in order not to 
discourage poor laboring people whom they brought 
over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of 
three or four years, when the country became adapted 
to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses, 
spending on them several thousands." 

In this course which our ancestors took there was a 
show of prudence at least, as if their principle were to 
satisfy the more pressing wants first. But are the more 
pressing wants satisfied now? When I think of acquiring 
for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am deterred, 
for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human 
culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread 
far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. 
Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected 
even in the rudest period; but let our houses first be 
lined with beauty, where they come in contact with our 
lives, like the tenement of the shellfish, and not over- 
laid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two 
of them, and know what they are lined with. 

Though we are not so degenerate but that we might 
possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins to-day, 
it certainly is better to accept the advantages, though 
so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of 
mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards 
and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more 
easily obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or 
bark in sufficient quantities, or even well-tempered clay 
or flat stones. I speak undcrstandingly on this sub- 
ject, for I have made myself acquainted with it both 



ECONOM Y. 35 

theoretically and practically. With a little more wit 
we might use these materials so as to become richer than 
the richest now are, and make our civilization a blessing. 
The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage. 
But to make haste to my own experiment. 

Xear the end of March, 1S45, I borrowed an axe and 
went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to 
where I intended to build my house, and began to cut 
down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, 
for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, 
but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to per- 
mit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enter- 
prise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold 
on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned 
it sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside 
where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which 
I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the 
woods where pines and hickories were springing up. 
The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there 
were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and 
saturated with water. There were some slight flurries 
of snow during the days that I worked there; but for 
the most part when I came out on the railroad, on my 
way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming 
in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring 
sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds 
already come to commence another year with us. They 
were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's 
discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the 
life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One 
day,, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green 
hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had 
placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell 
the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and 
he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, 
as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an 
hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out 
of the torpicl state. It appeared to me that for a like 
reason men remain in their present low and primitive 
condition; but if they should feel the influence of the 



36 WALDEN. 

spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity 
rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously 
seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with por- 
tions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting 
for the sun to thaw them. On the 1st of April it rained 
and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, 
which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping 
about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the 
spirit of the frog. 

So I went on for some days cutting and hewing tim- 
ber, and also studs and rafters, all wnth my narrow axe, 
not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, 
singing to myself, — 

Men say they know many things; 

But lo! they have taken wings, 

The arts and sciences, 

And a thoasand apphances; 

The wind tliat blows 

Is all that anybody knows. 

I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of 
the studs on two sides only, and the rafters and floor 
timbers on one side, leaving the rest of the bark on, 
so that they were just as straight and much stronger 
than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised 
or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools 
by this time. My days in the woods were not very long 
ones; yet I usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, 
and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped, at 
noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had 
cut off, and to my bread was imparted some of their 
fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat 
of pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than 
the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut dow^n some of 
them, having become better acquainted with it. Some- 
times a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound 
of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips 
which I had made. 

By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my 
work, but rather made the most of it, my house was 
framed and ready for the raising. I had already bought 
the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked 



ECONOMY. 37 

on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Col- 
lins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. 
When I called to see it he was not at home. I walked 
about the outside, at first unobserved from within, the 
window was so deep and high. It was of small dimen- 
sions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else 
to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as 
if it were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest 
part, though a good deal warped and made brittle by 
the sun. Door-sill there was none, but a perennial 
passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C. 
came to the door and asked me to view it from the in- 
side. The hens were driven in by my approach. It 
was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most part, dank, 
clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a boarcl 
which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to 
show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also 
that the board floor extended under the bed, warning 
me not to step into the cellar, a sort of dust hole two 
feet deep. In her own words, they were "good boards 
overhead, good boards all around, and a good window," — 
of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed 
out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a 
place to sit, an infant in the house where it was born, 
a si k parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent 
new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The 
bargain was soon concluded, for James had in the mean- 
while returned. I to pay four dollars and twenty-five 
cents to-night, he to vacate at five to-morrow morning, 
selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession 
at six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and 
anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims, 
on the score of ground rent and fuel. This he assured 
me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed him and 
his family on the road. One large bundle held their all, 
— bed, coffee mill, looking-glass, hens, — all but the cat, 
she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as 
I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, 
and so became a dead cat at last. 

I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing 
the nails, and removed it to the pond side by small cart- 



38 WALDEN. 

loads, spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach 
and warp back again in the sun. One early thrush gave 
me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. 
I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that 
neighbor Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the 
carting, transferred the still tolerable, straight, and 
drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his pocket, and 
then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, 
and look freshly up, unconcerned with spring thoughts, 
at the devastation; there l^eing a dearth of work, as he 
said. He was there to represent spectatordom, and help 
make this seemingly insignificant event one with the 
removal of the gods of Troy. 

I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, 
where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, clown 
through sumach and blackberry roots, and the lowest 
stain of vegetation, six feet square by seven deep, to 
a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any win- 
ter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but 
the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps 
its place. It was but two hours' work. I took partic- 
ular pleasure in this breaking of ground, for in almost 
all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equable tem- 
perature. Under the most splendid house in the city 
is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots 
as of old, and long after the superstructure has disap- 
peared posterity remark its dent in the earth. The 
house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a 
burrow. 

At length, in the beginning of May, with the help 
of some of my acquaintances, rather to improve so good 
an occasion for neighborliness than from an}- necessity, 
I set up the frame of my house. No man was ever more 
honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are 
destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures 
one day, I began to occupy my house on the 4th of 
July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards 
were carefully feathor-edged and lapped, so that it was 
perfectly impervious to rain; but l)efore l^oarding I 
laid the foundation of a chimney at one end, bringing 
two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in 



ECONOMY. 39 

my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in 
the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, 
doing my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on 
the ground, early in the morning: which mode I still 
think is in some respects more convenient and agree- 
able than the usual one. When it stormed before my 
bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, 
and sat under them to watch my loaf, and passed some 
pleasant hours in that way. In those days, when my 
hands were much employed, I read but little, but the 
least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, 
or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in 
fact answered the same purpose, as the Iliad. 

It would be worth the while to build still more de- 
liberately than I did, considering, for instance, what 
foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in 
the nature of man, and perchance never raising any 
superstructure until we found a better reason for it than 
our temporal necessities even. There is some of the 
same fitness in a man's building his own house that there 
is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if 
men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, 
and provided food for themselves and families simply and 
honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally 
developed, as birds universally sing when they are so en- 
gaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which 
lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and 
cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical 
notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construc- 
tion to the carpenter? What does architecture amount 
to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all 
my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and 
natural an occupation as building his house. We belong 
to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the 
ninth part of man: it is as much the preacher, and the 
merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of 
labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? 
Xo doubt another may also think for me; but it is not 
therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion 
of my thinking for myself. 



40 WALDEX. 

True, there are architects so called in this country, 
and I have heard of one at least possessed with the idea 
of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth, 
a necessity, and hence a beaut}', as if it were a revelation 
to him. All very well perhaps from his point of view, 
but only a little better than the common dilettantism. 
A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at the 
cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put 
a core of truth within the ornaments, that every sugar 
plum in fact might have an almond or caraway seed in 
it, — though I hold that almonds are most wholesome 
without the sugar, — and not how the inhabitant, the in- 
dweller, might build trul}^ within and without, and let 
the ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable 
man ever supposed that ornaments were something out- 
ward and in the skin merety, — that the tortoise got his 
spotted shell, or the shellfish its mo the r-o' -pearl tints, 
by such a contract as the inhabitants of Broadway their 
Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with 
style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that 
of its shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to 
paint the precise color' of his virtue on his standard. 
The enemy will find it out. He may turn pale when the 
trial comes. This man seemed to me to lean over the 
cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude 
occupants, who really knew it better than he. What 
of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually 
grown from within outward, out of the necessities and 
character of the indweller, who is the only builder, — 
out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, 
without ever a thought for the appearance; and what- 
ever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be pro- 
duced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of 
life. The most interesting dwellings in this countr}', as 
the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble 
log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life 
of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any 
peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them 
picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen's 
suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as 
agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little strain- 



ECONOMY. 41 

ing after effect in the stj-le of his dwelling. A great 
proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, 
and a September gale would strip them off, like bor- 
rowed plumes, without injury to the substantials. They 
can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines 
in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about 
the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects 
of our Bibles spent as much time about their cornices as 
the architects of our churches do? So are made the 
belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors. 
Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few sticks are 
slanted over him or under him, and what colors are 
daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, 
in any earnest sense, he slanted them- and daubed it; 
but the spirit having departed out of the tenant, it is 
of a piece with constructing his own coffin, — the architec- 
ture of the grave, and "carpenter" is but another name 
for "coffin-maker." One man says, in his despair or 
indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your 
feet and paint your house that color. Is he thinking 
of his last and narrow house? Toss up a copper for it 
as well. What an abundance of leisure he must have! 
Why do you take up a handful of the dirt? Better paint 
your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or 
blush for you. An enterprise to improve the style of 
cottage architecture! When you have got my ornaments 
ready I will wear them. 

Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the 
sides of my house, which were already impervious to 
rain, with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the 
first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged to straighten 
with a plane. 

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten 
feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a 
garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two 
trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fire-place 
opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the usual 
price for such materials as I used, but not counting the 
work, all of which was done by myself, was as follows; 
and I give the details because very few are able to tell 
exactly what their houses cost, and fewer still, if any, 



4'2 WALDEX. 

the separate cost of the various materials which compose 
them : — 



Boards $8 03J 



/ Mostly shanty 
\ boards. 

Refuse shingles for roof and sides 4 00 ^ 

Laths 1 25 

Two second-hand windows with glass. . . 2 43 

One thousand old brick 4 00 

Two casks of lime 2 40 That was high. 

Hair .> 31 (Morethanl 

\ needed. 

Mantle-tree iron 15 

Nails 3 90 

Hinges and screws 14 

Latch 10 

Chalk 01 

Transportation ^ { ^ ^'^L^^^S' 

In all $28 12^ 

These are all the materials excepting the timber, 
stones, and sand, which I claimed by scjuatter's right. 
I have also a small wood-shed adjoining, made chiefly 
of the stuff which was left after building the house. 

I intend to build me a house which w411 surpass any 
on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, 
as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more 
than my present one. 

I thus found that the student who wishes for a slielter 
can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater 
than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to 
boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag 
for humanity rather than for myself; and my short- 
comings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of 
my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypoc- 
risy, — chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my 
wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any man, — I will 
breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is 
such a relief to both the -moral and physical system; 
and I am resolved that I will not through humility be- 
come the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak 
a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the 
mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little larger 



ECONOMY. 43 

than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the 
corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two 
side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers 
the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and per- 
haps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think 
that if we had more true wisdom in these respects, not 
only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, 
more would already have been acquired, but the pecuniary 
expense of getting an education would in a great measure 
vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires 
at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else 
ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with 
proper management on both sides. Those things for 
which the most money is demanded are never the things 
which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, 
is an important item in the term bill, while for the far 
more valuable education which he gets by associating 
with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge 
is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, 
to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then 
following blindly the principles of a division of labor 
to its extreme, a principle which should never be fol- 
lowed but with circumspection, — to call in a contractor 
who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs 
Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the founda- 
tions, while the students that are to be are said to be 
fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights suc- 
cessive generations have to pay. I think that it would 
be better than this, for the students, or those who desire 
to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation them- 
selves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and 
retirement by sj'stematically shirking any labor neces- 
sary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable 
leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone 
can make leisure fruitful. ''But," says one, "you do 
not mean that the students should go to work with their 
hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that 
exactly, but I mean something which he might think 
a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play 
life, or study it merely, while the community supports 
them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from 



44 WALDEN. 

beginning to end. How could j'ouths better learn to 
live than by at once trying the experiment of living? 
Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as 
mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something 
about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not 
pursue the common course, which is merely to send him 
into the neighl^orhood of some professor, where any- 
thing is professed and practised but the art of life; — to 
survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, 
and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, 
and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and 
and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites 
to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to 
what vaga])ond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured 
by the monsters that swarm all around him, while con- 
templating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which 
would have advanced the most at the end of a month, 
— the boy who had made his own jackknife from the 
ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as 
would be necessary for this, — or the boy who had at- 
tended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in 
the meanwhile, and had received a Rogers' penknife 
from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his 
fingers? ... To my astonishment I was informed on 
leaving college that I had studied navigation! — why, if 
I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have 
known more about it. Even the poor student studies and 
is taught only political economy, while that economy of 
living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even 
sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence 
is that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and 
Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably. 

As with our colleges, so with a hundred ''modern 
improvements": there is an illusion about them; there 
is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on 
exacting compound interest to the last for his early 
share and numerous succeeding investments in them. 
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which dis- 
tract our attention from serious things. They are but 
improved means to an unimproved end, an end which 
it was alreadv l)ut too easy to arrive at; as railroads^ 



ECONOMY. 45 

lead to Boston or Now York. Wc are in great haste to 
construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; 
l3ut ]Mainc and Texas, it may be, have nothing important 
to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as 
the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distin- 
guished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one 
end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had noth- 
ing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and 
not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the 
Atlantic and bring the old w^orld some weeks nearer to 
the new; but perchance the first news that will leak 
through into the broad, flapping American ear will be 
that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. 
After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute 
does not carry the most important messages; he is not 
an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts 
and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried 
a peck of corn to mill. 

One says to me, " I wonder that you do not lay up 
money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and 
go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country." But I 
am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest 
traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, 
Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance 
is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost 
a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty 
cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start 
now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled 
at that rate by the week together. You will in the mean- 
while have earned your fare, and arrive there sometime 
to-morrow, or possil)ly this evening, if you are lucky 
enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitch- 
burg, you will be working here the greater part of the 
daly. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, 
I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for see- 
ing the country and getting experience of that kind, I 
should have to cut your acquaintance altogether. 

Such is the universal law, which no man can ever out- 
wit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it 
is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the 
world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading 



46 WALDEN. 

the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct 
notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks 
and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, 
in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd 
rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ''All 
aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor 
condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but 
the rest are run over, — and it will be called, and will 
be, "A melancholy accident." No doubt they can ride 
at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they 
survive so long, but they will probably have lost their 
elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spend- 
ing of the best part of one's life earning money in order 
to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable 
part of it, reminds me of the Englishn;an who went to 
India to make a fortune first, in order that he might 
return to England and live the life of a poet. He should 
have gone up garret at once. ''What!" exclaim a mil- 
lion Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the 
land, "is not this railroad which we have built a good 
thing?" Yes, I answer, com'paratively good, that is, you 
might have clone worse; but I wish, as you are brothers 
of mine, that you could have spent your time better than 
digging in this dirt. 

Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or 
twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, 
in order to meet my unusual expenses, I planted aljout 
two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly 
with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, 
peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, t 
mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was solcl | 
the preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents I 
an acre. One farmer said that it was "good for nothing 
but to raise cheeping squirrels on." I put no manure 
whatever on this land, not being the owner, but merely 
a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so much again, 
and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out several 
cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me with 
fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould, 
easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater 



ECOXOMY. 47 

luxuriance of the boans there. The dead and for the 
most part unmerchantable wood ijehind my house, and 
the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder 
of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for 
the ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My 
farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, 
seed, work, &c., $14 72^. The seed corn was given me. 
This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant 
more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and 
eighteen bushels of potatoes, besides some peas and sweet 
corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too late to 
come to anything. INIy whole income from the farm was 



There are left $8 7U 

besides produce consumed and on hand at the time this 
estimate was made of the value of $4 50, — the amount 
on hand much more than balancing a little grass which 
I did not raise. All things considered, that is, consider- 
ing the importance of a man's soul and of to-day, not- 
withstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, 
nay, partly even because of its transient character, I 
believe that that was doing better than any farmer 
in Concord did that year. 

The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all 
the land which I required, about a third of an acre, 
and I learned from the experience of both years, not 
being the least awed by many celebrated works on hus- 
bandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would 
live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and 
raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insuf- 
ficient quanity of more luxurious and expensive things, 
he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, 
and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to 
use oxen to plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time 
to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his 
necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd 
hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied 
to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire 



48 WALDEN. 

to speak impartially on this point, and as one not in- 
terested in the success or failure of the present economical 
and social arrangements. I was more independent than 
any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house 
or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which 
is a very crooked one, every moment. Besides being 
better off than the}^ already, if my house had been burned 
or my crops had failed, I should have been nearly as well 
off as before. 

I am wont to think that men are not so much the 
keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men, the 
former are so much the freer. Men and oxen exchange 
work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen 
will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm 
is so much the larger, Man does some of his part of 
the exchange work in his six weeks of haying, and it 
is no boy's play. Certainly no nation that lived simply 
in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would 
commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. 
True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a nation 
of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there 
should be. However, / should never have broken a 
horse or bull and taken him to board for any work he 
might do for me, for fear I should become a horseman 
or a herdsman merely; and if society seems to be the 
gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man's 
gain is not another's loss, and that the stable-boy has 
ec^ual cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted that 
some public works would not have been constructed 
without this aid, and let man share the glory of such 
with the ox and horse; does it follow that he could not 
have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself 
in that case? When men begin to do. not merely un- 
necessary or artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with 
their assistance, it is inevitable that a few do all the 
exchange work with the oxen,' or, in other words, be- 
come the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only 
woi'ks for the animal within him, but, for a symlsol of 
this, he works for the animal without him. Though we 
have many substantial houses of brick or stone, the pros- 
perity of the farmer is still measured by the degree to 



ECONOMY. 49 

which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said 
to have the hirgest houses for oxen, cows, and horses 
hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its pubHc build- 
ings; but there are very few halls for free worship or 
free speech in this count}'. It should not be by their 
architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract 
thought, that nations should seek to commemorate 
themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat- 
Geeta than all the ruins of the East ! Towers and temples 
are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent 
mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius 
is not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, 
or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent. To what 
end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia, 
when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. 
Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to per- 
petuate the memory of themselves by the amount of 
hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were 
taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece 
of good sense would be more memorable than a monu- 
ment as high as the moon. I love better to see stones 
in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. 
More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest 
man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wan- 
dered farther from the true end of life. The religion 
and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build 
splendid temples; but what you might call Christianity 
does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes 
toward its tomlj onl}'. It buries itself alive. As for 
the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so 
much as the fact that so many men could be found de- 
graded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb 
for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been 
wiser and manlier to have clrowned in the Nile, and then 
given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent 
some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for 
it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, 
it is much the same all the world over, whether the build- 
ing be an Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. 
It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is 
vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and 



50 



WALDEX 



butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect, de- 
signs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil 
and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, stone- 
cutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down 
•on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high 
towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once 
in this town who undertook to dig through to China, 
and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese 
pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go 
out of my way to admire the hole which he made. Many 
are concerned about the monuments of the West and East, 
— to know who built them. For my part, I should like 
to know who in those days did not build them, — who 
were above such trifling. But to proceed with my 
statistics. 

By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various 
other kinds in the village in the meanwhile, for I have 
as many trades as fingers, I had earned S13 34. The 
expense of food for eight months, namely, from July 
4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were 
made, though I lived there more than two years,— 
not counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some 
peas, which I had raised, nor considering the value of 
what was on hand at the last date, was 



Rice $1 73^ 

Molasses 1 7.3 

Rye meal 1 04-J 

Indian meal 99f 

Pork 22 

Flour 88 

Sugar 80 

Lard 65 

Apples 25 

Dried apples 22 

Sweet potatoes 10 

One pumpkin 06 

One watermelon .... 02 

Salt 03 



Cheapest form of the saccharine. 

Cheaper than rye. 

/ Costs more than Indian meal, 
\ both money and trouble. 



> 



^'4 



Yes, I did eat $S 74, all told; but I should not thus 
unblushingly pubhsh my guilt, if I did not know that 
most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and 



ECONOMY. 51 

that their deeds would look no better in print. The 
next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish for my 
dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a wood- 
chuck which ravaged my beanfield, — effect his trans- 
migration, as a Tartar would say, — and devour him, 
partly for experiment's sake; but though it affordecl 
me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a musky 
flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that 
a good practice, however it might seem to have your 
woodchucks ready dressed by the village butcher. 

Clothing and some incidental expenses within the 
same dates, though little can be inferred from this item, 
amounted to 

$8 40i 
Oil and some household utensils 2 00 

So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for wash- 
ing and mending, which for the most part were done out 
of the house, and their bills have not yet been received, — 
and these are all and more than all the ways by which 
money necessarily goes out in this part of the world, — 
were 

House $28 12+ 

Farm one year 14 72+ 

Food eight months 8 74 

Clothing, &c., eight months 8 40f 

Oil, &c., eight months 2 00 

In all $61 99f 

I address myself now to those of my readers who have 
a living to get. And t^ meet this I have for farm pro- 
duce sold 

$23 44 
Earned by day-labor 13 34 t 

In all $36 78 

which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves 
a balance of S2o 21f on the one side, — this being very 
nearly the means with which I started, and the measure 
of expenses to be incurred, — and on the other, besides 
the leisure and independence and health thus secured, 



52 WALDEN. 

a comfortable house for me as long as I choose to oc- 
cupy it. 

These statistics, however accidental and therefore 
uninstructive they may appear, as they have a certain 
completeness, have a certain value also. Nothing was 
given me of which I have not rendered some account. 
It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone 
cost me in money about twenty-seven cents a week. 
It was, for nearly two years after this, rye and Indian 
meal without yeast, potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, 
molasses, and salt, and my drink water. It was fit that 
I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philos- 
ophy of India. To meet the objections of some inveterate 
cavillers, I may as well state that if I dined out occa- 
sionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have 
opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detri- 
ment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining 
out, being, as I have stated, a constant element, does 
not in the least affect a comparative statement like this. 

I learned from my two years' experience that it would 
cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary 
food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple 
a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. 
I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactor}^ on sev- 
eral accounts, simply off a dish of purslane (Portulaca 
oleracea) which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and 
salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of 
the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable 
man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a 
sufficient number of ears of green sweet-corn boiled, 
with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which 
I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not 
of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they 
frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for 
want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks 
that her son lost his life because he took to drinking 
water only. 

The reader will perceive that I am treating the sub- 
ject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of 
view, and he will not venture to put my al^stemious- 
ness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder. 



ECONOMY. 53 

Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, 
genuine hoe-cakes, which I baked before my fire out of 
doors on a shingle or the end of a stick of timber sawed 
off in building my house; but it was wont to get smoked 
and to have a piny flavor. I tried flour also; but have 
at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most 
convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no 
little amusement to bake several small loaves of this 
in succession, tending and turning them as carefully as 
an Egyptian his hatching eggs. They were a real 
cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had to my senses 
a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I kept 
in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made 
a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread- 
making, consulting such authorities as offered, going 
back to the primitive days and first invention of the un- 
leavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats 
men first reached the mildness and refinement of this 
diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through 
that accidental souring of the dough which, it is sup- 
posed, taught the leavening process, and through the 
various fermentations thereafter, till I came to "good, 
sweet, wholesome bread," the staff of life. Leaven, 
which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which 
fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved 
like the vestal fire, — some precious bottle-full, I sup- 
pose, first brought over in the Mayflower, did the business 
for America, and its influence is still rising, swelling, 
spreading, in cerealian billows over the land, — this seed 
I regularly and faithfully procured from the village, 
till at length one m.orning I forgot the rules, and scalded 
my yeast; by which accident I discovered that even 
this was not indispensable, — for my discoveries were 
not by the synthetic but analytic process, — and I have 
gladly omitted it since, though most housewives earnestly 
assured me that safe and wholesome bread without 
yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a 
speedy decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to 
be an essential ingredient, and after going without it 
for a year am still in the land of the living; and I am 
glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full 



54 WALDEX. 

in m}' pocket, which would sometimes pop and dis- 
charge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler 
and more respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who 
more than any other can adapt himself to all climates 
and circumstances. Neither did I put any sal soda, or 
other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would seem that 
I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius 

/ Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. " Panem 
depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. 
Farinam in mortarium indito, ac|ute paulatim addito, 
subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, 
coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean — "Make 
kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. 
Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and 
knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, 
mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a baking- 
kettle. Not a word about leaven. But I did no.t always 
use this staff of life. At one time, owing to the emptiness 
of m}" purse, I saw none of it for more than a month. 

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own 
breadstuff s in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not 
depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. 
Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, 
in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the 
shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are 
hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer 
gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own produc- 
ing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, 
at a greater cost, at the store. I saw that I could easily 
raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn, for the 

' former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does 
not require the best, and grind them in a hand-mill, and 
so do without rice and pork; and if I must have some 
concentrated sweet, I found b}' experiment that I could 
make a very good molasses either of pumpkins or beets, 
and I knew that I needed only to set out a few maples 
to obtain it more easily still, and while these were grow- 
ing I could use various substitutes besides those which 
I have named. " For," as the Forefitthers sang, — 

"we can make liquor to sweeten our lips 
Of pumpkins and parsni_)s and walnut-tree chips." 



ECOXOMY. 55 

Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain 
this might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, 
or, if I did without it altogether, I should probably drink 
the less water. I do not learn that the Indians ever 
troubled themselves to go after it. 

Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my 
food was concerned, and having a shelter already, it 
would only remain to get clothing and fuel. The panta- 
loons which I now wear were woven in a farmer's family, 
— thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in man; 
for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as 
great and memorable as that from the man to the far- 
mer; — and in a new country fuel is an encumbrance. 
As for a habitat, if I were not permitted still to squat, I 
might purchase one acre at the same price for which 
the land I cultivated was sold — namely, eight dollars 
and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I en- 
hanced the value of the land b}' squatting on it. 

There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes 
ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on 
vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the 
matter at once, — for the root is faith, — I am accustomed 
to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they 
cannot understand that, they cannot understand much 
that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to hear of 
experiments of this kind being tried; as that a young 
man tried for a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the 
ear, using his teeth for all mortar. The squirrel tribe 
tried the same and succeeded. The human race is 
interested in these experiments, though a few old women 
who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds 
in mills, may be alarmed. 

My furniture, part of which I made myself, and the 
rest cost me nothing of which I have not rendered an 
account, consisted of a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, 
a looking-glass three inches in diameter, a pair of tongs 
and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a frying-pan, a 
dipper, a wash bowl, two knives and forks, three plates, 
one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and 
a japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a 



56 . WALDEN, 

pumpkin. That is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of 
such chairs as I hke best in the village garrets to be had 
for taking them away. Furniture! Thank God, I can 
sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture ware- 
house. What man but a philosopher would not be 
ashamed to see his furniture packed in a cart and going 
up country exposed to the light of heaven and the eyes 
of men, a beggarly account of empty boxes? That is 
Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from inspect- 
ing such a load whether it belonged to a so-called rich 
man or a poor one; the owner always seemed poverty- 
stricken. Indeed, the more you have of such things the 
poorer j^ou are. Each load looks as if it contained the 
contents of a dozen shanties; and if one shanty is poor, 
this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what do we 
move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvioe; 
at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, 
and leave this to be burned? It is the same as if all these 
traps were buckled to a man's belt, and he could not 
move over the rough country where our lines are cast 
without dragging them, — dragging his trap. He was 
a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The muskrat 
will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man 
has lost his elasticity. How often he is at a dead set! 
"Sir, if I may be so bold, what do you mean by a dead 
set?" If you are a seer, whenever 3^ou meet a man you 
will s.ce all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends 
to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture 
and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, 
and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making 
what headway he can. I think that the man is at a dead 
set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where 
his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot 
but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact- 
looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak 
of his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But 
what shall I do with my furniture? " My gay butterfly 
is entangled in a spider's web then. Even those who 
seem for a long while not to have an}^, if you inquire 
more narrowly you will find have some stored in some- 
body's barn. I look upon England to-day as an old 



ECONOMY. ^ : 57 

gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, 
trumpery which has accumulated from long housekeep- 
ing, which he has not the courage to burn; great trunk, 
little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away the 
first three at least. It would surpass the powers of a 
well man nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I 
should certainly advise a sick one to lay down his bed 
and run. When I have met an immigrant tottering 
under a bundle which contained his all — looking like an 
enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his 
neck — I have pitied him, not because that was his all, 
but because he had all that he could carry. If I have 
got to drag my trap, I will take care that it be a light one 
and do not nip me in a vital part. But perchance it 
would be wisest never to put one's paw into it. 

I w^ould observe, by the way, that it costs me noth- 
ing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the 
sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in. 
The moon will not sour milk nor taint meat of mine, nor 
will the sun injure my furniture or fade my carpet, and 
if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better 
economy to retreat l^ehind some curtain which nature 
has provided, than to add a single item to the details 
of housekeeping. A lady once offered me a mat, but as 
I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to 
spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring 
to wipe my feet on the sod before m}^ door. It is best to 
avoid the beginnings of evil. 

Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's 
effects, for his life had not been ineffectual: — 

"The evil that men do lives after them." 

As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had 
begun to accumulate in his father's clay. Among the 
rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half 
a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things 
were not burned ; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruc- 
tion of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. 
The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought 
them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets 



58 • ^ WALDEX. 

and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, 
when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks 
the dust. 

The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, 
be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through 
the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have 
the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or 
not. Would it not be well if we were to celebrate such 
a "busk/' or ''feast of first fruits," as Bartram describes 
to have been the custom of the Mucclasse Indians? 
"When a town celebrates the busk," says he, "having 
previously provided themselves with new clothes, new 
pots, pans, and other household utensils and furniture, 
they collect all their worn-out clothes and other despicable 
things, sweep and cleanse their houses, squares, and the 
whole town, of their filth, which with all the remaining 
grain and other old provisions they cast together into 
one common heap, and consume it with fire. After 
having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the 
fire in the town is extinguished. During this fast they 
abstain from the gratification of ever}' appetite and pas- 
sion whatever. A general amnesty is proclaimed; all 
malefactors may return to their town. . . . 

"On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing 
dry wood together, produces new fire in the public square,, 
from whence every habitation in the town is supplied 
with the new and pure flame." 

They then feast on the new corn and fruits and dance 
. and sing for three days, " and the four following days they 
I receive visits and rejoice with their friends from neigh- 
boring towns who have in like manner purified and pre- 
pared themselves." 

The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at 
the end of every fifty-two years, in the belief that it was 
time for the world to come to an end. 

I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, 
as the dictionary defines it, "outward and visible sign 
of an inward and spiritual grace," than this, and I have 
no doubt that they were originally inspired directly 
from heaven to do thus, though the}- have no Biblical 
record of the revelation. 



ECONOMY. 59 

y- 

For more than five 3'ears I maintained myself thus 
solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that by 
working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the 
expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well 
as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. 
I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping, and found that 
my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of pro- 
portion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and 
train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I 
lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for 
the good of my fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, 
this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that 
it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that 
then I should probably be on my w'ay to the devil. I was 
actually afraid that I might l)y that time be doing what 
is called a good business. When formerly I w^as looking 
about to see what I could do for a living, some sad expe- 
rience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh 
in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and 
seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could 
do, and its small profits might suffice, — for my greatest 
skill has been to want but little, — so little capital it 
required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, 
I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went un- 
hesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated 
this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all 
summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and 
thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks 
of Admetus. I also dreamed that I might gather the 
wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved 
to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay- 
cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses 
everything it handles; and though you trade in messages 
from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the 
business. 

As I preferred some things to others, and especially 
valued my freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed 
well, I did not wish to spend my time in earning rich 
■carpets or other fine furniture, or delicate cookery, or a 
house in the Grecian or the Gothic stjde just yet. If 
there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire 



60 WALDEN. 

these things, and who know how to use them when 
acquired, I rehnquish to them the pursuit. Some are . 
"industrious/' and appear to love labor for its own sake, 
or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; 
to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who 
would not know what to do with more leisure than they 
now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they 
do, — work till they pay for themselves, and get their 
free papers. For myself I found that the occupation 
of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, espe- 
cially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year 
to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going 
down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself 
to his chosen pursuit, independent of his lal^or; but his 
employer, who speculates from month to month, has no 
respite from one end of the year to the other. 

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, 
that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship I 
but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the* 
pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the 
more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should 
earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats.] 
easier than I do. 

One young man of my acquaintance, who has in- 
herited some acres, told me that he thought he should 
live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have any 
one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, be- 
sides that before he has fairly learned it I may have 
found out another for myself, I desire that there may be 
as many different persons in the v/orlcl as possible ; but i j 
I would have each one be very careful to find out and |j 
pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's 
or his neighbor's instead. The vouth may build or 
plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing 
that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a 
mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor 
or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but 
that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not 
arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we 
would preserve the true course. 

Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer 



ECONOMY. 61 

still for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally 
more expensive than a small one, since one roof may 
cover, one cellar underlie, and one wall separate several 
apartments. But for my part, I preferred the solitary 
dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly be cheaper to 
build the whole yourself than to convince another of 
the advantage of the common wall; and when you have 
done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper, 
must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad 
neighbor, and also not keep his side in repair. The 
only cooperation which is commonly possible is exceed- 
ingly partial and superficial; and what little true coopera- 
tion there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony 
inaudible to men. If a man has faith he will cooperate 
with equal faith everywhere; if he has not faith, he will 
continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever 
company he is joined to. To cooperate, in the highest 
as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. 
I heard it proposed lately that two young men should 
travel together over the world, the one without money, 
earning his means as he went, before the mast and be- 
hind the plough, the other carrying a bill of exchange in 
his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long 
be companions or cooperate, since one would not operate 
at all. They would part at the first interesting crisis 
in their adventures. Above all, as I have implied, the 
man who goes alone can start to-day; but he who travels 
with anotlier must wait till that other is ready, and it 
may be a long time before they get off. 

But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my 
townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged 
very little in philanthropic enterprises. I have made 
some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others 
have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who 
have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake 
the support of some poor family in the town; and if I 
had nothing to do, — for the devil finds employment for 
the idle, — I might try my hand at some such pastime 
as that. However, when I have thought to indulge 
myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an 



62 WALDEN. 

obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all 
respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have 
even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they 
have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain 
poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted 
in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that 
one at least may be spared to other and less humane 
pursuits. You must have a genius for charity as well 
as for anything else. As for Doing-good, that is one of 
the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried 
it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that 
it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I should 
not consciously and deliberatel}'' forsake my particular 
calling to do the good which society demands of me, to 
save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that 
a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is 
all that now preserves it. But I would not stand be- 
tween any man and his genius; and to him who does this 
work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and 
life, I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it 
doing evil, as it is most likely they will. 

I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar 
one; no doubt many of my readers would make a similar 
defence. At doing something, — I will ■ not engage that 
my neighbors shall pronounce it good, — I do not hesitate 
to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire; but 
what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What 
good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be 
aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly 
unintended. Men say, practically. Begin where you are 
and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become 
of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about 
doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I 
should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun 
should stop when he has kindled his fires up to the 
splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and 
go al:)out like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every 
cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, 
and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increas- 
ing his genial heat and l^eneficcnce till he is of such Ijright- 
ness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, 



ECONOMY. 63 

and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his 
own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy 
has discovered, the world going about him getting good. 
When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by 
his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and 
drove out of the lieaten track, he burned several blocks 
of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched 
the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, 
and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter 
hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, 
and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine 
for a year. 

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from good- 
ness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If 
I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my 
house with the conscious design of doing me good, I 
should run for my life, as from that dr}^ and parching 
wind of the African deserts called the simoom, whicli 
fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust 
till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some 
of his good done to me, — some of its virus mingled with 
my blood. No, — in this case I would rather suffer 
evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me 
because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm 
me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if 
I should ever fall into one. I can find 3'ou a Newfound- 
land dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not 
love for one's fellow-man in the broadest sense. Howard 
was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in 
his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, 
what are a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy 
do not help lis in our best estate, when we are most 
worthy to be helped? I never heard of a philanthropic 
meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any 
good to me, or the like of me. 

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, 
being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of 
torture to their tormentors. Being superior to physical 
suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior 
to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; 
and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less 



64 WALDEN. 

persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, 
did not care how they were done by, who loved their 
enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely 
forgiving them all they did. 

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most 
need, though it be your example which leaves them far 
behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and 
do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious 
mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so 
cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. 
It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. 
If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags 
with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers 
who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, 
while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more 
fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who 
had slipped into the water came to my house to warm 
him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two 
pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they 
were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he 
could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered 
him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the 
very thing he needed. Then I began to pity myself, 
and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow 
on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. 
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil 
to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he 
who bestows the largest amount of time and money on 
the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to pro- 
duce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It 
is the pious slave-breeder devoting the i^roceeds of every 
tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some 
show their kindness to the poor by employing them in 
their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they em- 
ployed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth 
part of your income in charity; maybe you should 
spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. Society 
recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is 
this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession 
it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of justice? 

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is suf- 



ECONOMY. 65 

ficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly 
overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. 
A roljust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, 
praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, 
he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind 
uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its 
true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a 
reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and 
intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary, 
and political worthies, Shakspeare, Bacon, Cromwell, 
Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian 
heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him, 
he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest 
of the great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. 
Every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. The 
last were not England's best men and women; only, 
perhaps, her best philanthropists. 

I would not subtract anything from the praise that 
is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for 
all who by their lives and works are a blessing to man- 
kind. I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and 
benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. 
Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb 
tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most 
emploj-ed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of 
a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him 
to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His 
goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but 
a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of 
which he is unconscious. This is a charity which hides 
a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often sur- 
rounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- 
off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We 
shoidd impart our courage, and not our despair, our 
health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that 
this does not spread by contagion. From what southern 
plains comes up the voice of wailing? Under what lat- 
itudes reside the heathen to whom we send light? Who 
is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would 
redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not per- 
form his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, — 



G6 WALDEN. 

for that is the seat of sympathy, — he forthwith sets about 
reforming — the world. Being a microcosm himself, he 
discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to 
make it, — that the world has been eating green apples; 
to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, 
which there is danger awful to think of that the children 
of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his 
drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the 
Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and 
Chinese villages; and thus, b}^ a few years of phil- 
anthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using 
him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of 
his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one 
or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, 
and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet ancl 
wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity 
greater than I have committed. I never knew, and 
never shall know, a worse man than myself. 

I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not 
his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though 
he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this 
be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning 
rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous 
companions without apology. My excuse for not lectur- 
ing against the use of tobacco is that I never chewed 
it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers 
have to pay; though there are things enough I have 
chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should 
ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do 
not let your left hand know what 3'our right hand does, 
for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and 
tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about 
some free labor. 

Our manners have been corrupted by communica- 
tion with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with 
a melodious cursing of God and enduring him forever. 
One would say that even the prophets and redeemers 
had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes 
of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irre- 
pressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memo- 
rable praise of God. All health and success does me 



ECONOMY. 67 

good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; 
all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does 
me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me 
or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore man- 
kind by truh' Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural 
means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature our- 
selves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, 
and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to 
be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one 
of the worthies of the world. 

I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik 
Sadi of Shiraz, that "They asked a wise man, saying: 
Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God 
has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, 
or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; 
what mystery is there in this? He replied: Each has its 
appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the 
continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during 
their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states 
is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of 
this nature are the azads, or religious independents. — 
Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the 
Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad 
after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, 
be liberal as the date tree; but if it aff"ords nothing to 
give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.'' 



COMPLEMENTAL VERSES. 

THE PRETENSIONS OF POVERTY. 

"Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch, 
To claim a station in the firmament, 
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub. 
Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue 
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, 
With roots and pot-herbs; where thy right hand, 
Tearing those humane passions from the mind, 
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, ) 
Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense. 
And, Gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. 
We not require the dull society 
Of your necessitated temperance, 



68 WALDEN. 

Or that unnatural stupidity 

That knows nor joy nor sorrow; nor your forc'd 

Falsely exalted passive fortitude 

Above the active. This low abject brood, 

That fix their seats in mediocrity, 

Become your servile minds; but we advance 

Such virtues only as admit excess. 

Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence, 

All-seeing prudence, magnanimity 

That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue 

For which antiquity hath left no name, 

But patterns only, such as Hercules, 

Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell; 

And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, 

Study to know but what those worthies were." 

T. Cakew. 

II. 

WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 

At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to 
consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I 
have thus surveyed the country on every side within 
a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have 
bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be 
bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each 
farmer's premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed 
on husbandry Avith him, took his farm at his price, at 
any price, mortgaging it to him in my mintl; even put 
a higher price on it, — took everything but a deed of 
it, — took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk, — 
cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and with- 
drew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to 
carry it on. This experience entitled me to be regarded 
as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever 
I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated 
from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, 
a seat? — better if a country seat. I discovered many a 
site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which 
some might have thought too far from the village, but 
to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there 
I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, 
a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FUR. 69 

run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring 
come in. The future inhabitants of this region, where- 
cver they may place their houses, may be sure that they 
have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay 
out the land into orchard, woodlot, and pasture, and to 
decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand 
before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be 
seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow 
perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the num- 
ber of things which he can afford to let alone. 

My imagination carried me so far that I even had the 
refusal of several farms, — the refusal was all I wanted, — 
but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession. 
The nearest that I came to actual possession was when 
I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my 
seeds, and collected materials with which to make a 
wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the 
owner gave me a deed of it, his wife — every man has such 
a wife — changed her mind and w^ished to keep it, and 
he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak 
the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it sur- 
passed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had 
ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all to- 
gether. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and 
the farm too, for I had carried it far enough; or rather, 
to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave 
for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present 
of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, 
and materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that 
I had been a rich man without any damage to my property. 
But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually 
carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow. With 
respect to landscapes, — 

"I am monarch of all I survey, 
My right there is none to dispute. 

I have freciuently seen a poet withdraw, having en- 
joyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty 
farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. 
Why, the owner does not know it for many years when 
a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable 



70 WALDEN. 

kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked 
it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer 
only the skimmed milk. 

The real attractions of the Hollo well farm, to me, 
were: its complete retirement, being about two miles 
from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, 
and separated from the highway by a broad field; its 
bounding on the river, which the owner said protected 
it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was 
nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the 
house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put 
such an interval between me and the last occupant; the 
hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, gnawed by rab- 
bits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but 
above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest 
voyages up the river, when the house was concealed 
behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I 
heard the house-dog bark. I was in haste to buy it, 
before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks, 
cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up 
some young birches which had sprung up in the pasture, 
or, in short, had made any more of his improvements. 
To enjoy these advantages I was ready to carry it on; 
like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders, — I never 
heard what compensation he received for that, — and do 
all those things which had no other motive or excuse but 
that I might pay for it and l^e unmolested in my posses- 
sion of it; for I knew all the while that it would yield 
the most abundant crop of the kind I wanted if I could 
, only afford to let it alone. But it turned out as I have 
said. 

All that I could say, then, with respect to farming 
on a large scale (I have always cultivated a garden), was 
that I had had my seeds ready. Many think that seeds 
improve with age, I have no doubt that time dis- 
criminates between the good and the bad: and when at 
last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed. 
But I would say to my fellows, once for all. As long as 
possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little 
difference whether you are committed to a farm or the 
county jail. 



WHERE I LIVED, AXD WHAT I LIVED FOR. 71 

Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is mj' '^ cultiva- 
tor," says, and the only translation I have seen makes 
sheer nonsense of the passage, "When you think of 
getting a farm, turn it thus in your mind, not to buy 
greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not 
think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you 
go there the more it will please you, if it is good." I 
think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round 
it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may 
please me the more at last. 

The present was my next experiment of this kind, 
which I purpose to describe more at length; for con- 
venience, putting the experience of two years into one. 
As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to de- 
jection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the 
morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my 
neighbors up. 

When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, 
began to spend my nights as well as daj's there, which, 
by accident, was on Independence Da}', or the fourth 
of July, 1S45, my house was not finished for winter, 
]jut was merely a defence against the rain, without 
plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough weather- 
stained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool 
at night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly 
planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy 
look, especiall}' in the morning, when its timbers were 
saturated with dew, so that I fancied that by noon some 
sweet gum would exude from them. To my imagination it 
retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral 
character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain 
which I had visited the year before. This was an airy 
and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, 
and where a goddess might trail her garments. The 
winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep 
over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, 
or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning 
wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; 
]jut few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the 
outside of the earth evervwhere. 



72 WALDEN. 

The only house I had been the owner of before, if I 
except a boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally 
when making excursions in the summer, and this is still 
rolled up in my garret; but the boat, after passing from 
hand to hand, has gone down the stream of time. With 
this more sul^stantial shelter about me, I had made some 
progress toward settling in the world. This frame, 
so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, 
and reacted on the builder. It was suggestive somewhat 
as a picture in outlines. I did not need to go out of 
doors to take the air, for the atmosphere within had lost 
none of its freshness. It was not so much within doors 
as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather. 
The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like 
a meat without seasoning." Such was not my abode, 
for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not 
by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself 
near them. I was not only nearer to some of those 
which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, 
but to those wilder and more thrilling songsters of the 
forest which never, or rarely, serenade a villager, — the 
wood-thrush, the veery, the scarlet tanager, the field- 
sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many others. 

I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a 
mile and a half south of the village of Concord and some- 
what higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood 
between that town and Lincoln, and about two miles 
south of that our only field known to fame, Concord 
Battle Ground; but I was so low in the woods that the 
opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with 
wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, 
whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like 
a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far 
above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, 
I saw it throwing off its mighty clothing of mist, and 
here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth 
reflecting surface were revealed, while the mists, like 
ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into 
the woods, as at the breaking upof some nocturnal conventi- 
cle. The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later 
into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains. 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 73 

This smull lake was of most value as a neighbor in 
the intervals of a gentle rain storm in August, when, 
both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky- 
overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of even- 
ing, and the wood-thrush sang around, and was heard 
from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother 
than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air 
above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the 
water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower 
heaven itself so much the more important. From a 
hill top near by, where the wood had recently been cut 
off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the pond, 
through a wide indentation in the hills which form the 
shore there, where their opposite sides sloping toward 
each other suggested a stream flowing out in that direction 
through a wooded valley, but stream there was none. 
That way I looked between and over the near green hills 
to some distant and higher ones in the horizon, tinged 
with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could catch 
a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more 
distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those true- 
blue coins from heaven's own mint, .and also of some 
portion of the village. But in other directions, even 
from this point, I could not see over or beyond the woods 
which surrounded me. It is well to have some water 
in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float 
the earth. One value even of the smallest well is that 
when you look into it you see that the earth is not con- 
tinent but insular. This is as important as that it keeps 
butter cool. When I looked across the pond from this 
peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of 
flood I distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in 
their seething valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth 
beyond the pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and 
floated even by this small sheet of intervening water, 
and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt was but 
dry land. 

Though the view from my door was still more con- 
tracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. 
There was pasture enough for my imagination. The 
low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, 



74 WALDEX. 

stretched away toward the prairies of the "West and the 
steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the rov- 
ing families of men. " There are none happy in the world 
but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon," — said 
Damodara, when his herds required new and larger 
pastures. 

Both place and time were changed and I dwelt nearer 
to those parts of the universe and to those ears in his- 
tory which had most attracted me. Where I live was 
as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. 
We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some 
remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind 
the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise 
and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually 
had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and 
unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the 
while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the 
Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, 
or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left 
behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my 
nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights 
by him. .Such was that part of creation where I had 
squatted : — 

"There was a shepherd that did Hve, 
And held his thoughts as high 
As were the mounts whereon his flocks 
Did hourly feed him by." 

What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks 
always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts? 
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my 
life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with 
Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of 
Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in 
the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the 
best things which I did. They say that characters were 
engraven on the bathing tub of king Tching-thang to 
this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do 
it again, and again, ancl forever again." I can under- 
stand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. I 
was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 75 

making its invisible and unimaoinable tour through my 
apartment at earhcst dawn, when I was sitting with 
door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet 
that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself 
an Iliad and Od}'ssey in the air, singing its own W'rath 
and wanderings. There was something cosmical about 
it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the ever- 
lasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, 
which is the most memorable season of the day, is the 
awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in 
us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes 
which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little 
is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, 
to which we are not awakened ]jy our Genius, but by 
the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awak- 
ened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations 
from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial 
music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling 
the air — to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and 
thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be 
good, no less than the light. That man who does not 
believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, 
and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired 
of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way. 
After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of 
man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, 
and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make. 
All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning 
time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, 
"All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry 
and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the 
actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and 
heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and 
emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and 
vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a 
perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say 
or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when 
I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral re- 
form is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men 
give so poor an account of their day if they have not 
been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. 



76 WALDEN. 

If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they 
would have performed something. The milHons are 
awake enough for phj-sical labor; but only one in a 
million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, 
only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. 
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man 
who was quite awake. How could I have looked him 
in the face? 

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, 
not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation 
of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest 
sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the 
unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a 
conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint 
a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make 
a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to 
carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium 
through which we look, which morally we can do. To 
effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. 
Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, 
worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and 
critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such 
paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly 
inform us how this might be done. 

I went to the woods because I wished to live delibr 
erately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see 
if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I 
came to die, discover that I had not lived. I ditl not 
wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did 
I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite neces- 
sary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow 
of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to 
rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave 
close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its 
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to 
get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish 
its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know 
it by experience, and be able to give a true account of 
it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to 
me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is 
of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily con- 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 77 

eluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify 
God and enjoy him forever." 

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells 
us that we were long ago changed into men ; like pygmies 
we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout 
upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a 
superfluous and evitablc wretchedness. Our life is 
frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly 
need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme 
cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Sim- 
plicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be 
as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; in- 
stead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your 
accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chop- 
ping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms 
and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be 
allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not 
founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at 
all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator 
indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of 
three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead 
of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in 
proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, 
made up of petty states, with its boundary forever 
fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how 
it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with 
all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the 
way, are all external and superficial, is just such an un- 
wieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with 
furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by 
luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation 
and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; 
and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid economy, 
a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and eleva- 
tion of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it 
is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export 
ice, and talk -through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles 
an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but 
whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a 
little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge 
rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go 



78 WALDEN. ■ 

to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will 
build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall 
we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and 
mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not 
ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever 
think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? 
Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. 
The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with 
sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are 
sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a 
new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have 
the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the mis- 
fortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over 
a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary 
sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they 
suddenly . stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about 
it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that 
it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the 
sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is 
a sign that they may sometime get up again. 

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of 
life? We are determined to be starved before we are 
hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and 
so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine 
to-morrow. As for ivork, we haven't any of any conse- 
quence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot 
possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give a 
few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, 
without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his 
farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that 
press of engagements which was his excuse so many 
times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might 
almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, 
not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will 
confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn 
it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, — or 
to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done 
as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church 
itself. Hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after 
dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, 
"What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood 



J 



WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 79 

his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every 
half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, 
to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After 
a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the break- 
fast. "Pray tell me anything new that has happened 
to a man anywhere on this globe," — and he reads it 
over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes 
gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never 
dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed 
mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment 
of an eye himself. 

For my part, I could easily do without the post- 
office. I think that there are very few important com- 
munications made through it. To speak critically, I 
never received more than one or two letters in my life — 
I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage. 
The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through 
which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thought 
which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure 
that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. 
If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by 
accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or 
one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the 
Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of 
grasshoppers in the winter, — we never need read of 
another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with 
the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances 
and applications? To a philosopher all 7iews,^ as it is 
called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old 
women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after 
this gossip. There was such a rush, as I hear, the other 
day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by 
the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass 
belonging to the establishment were broken by the 
pressure, — news which I seriously think a ready wit 
might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand 
with sufficient accuracy. As for Spain, for instance, if you 
know how to throw in Don Carlos and the Infanta, and 
Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to time 
in the right proportions, — they may have changed the 
names a little since I saw the papers, — and serve up a 



80 WALDEN. 

bull-fight when other entertainments fail, it will be true 
to the letter, and give us as good an idea of the exact 
state or ruin of things in Spain as the most succinct and 
lucid reports under this head in the newspapers: and as 
for England, almost the last significant scrap of news 
from that quarter was the revolution of 16-19; and if 
3'ou have learned the history of her crops for an average 
year, you never need attend to that thing again, unless 
your speculations are of a merely pecuniary character. 
If one may judge who rarely looks into the newspapers, 
nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French 
revolution not excepted. 

What news! how much more important to know what 
that is which was never old! "Kieou-he-yu (great dig- 
nitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu 
to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger 
to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: 
What is your master doing? The messenger answered 
with respect: My master desires to diminish the number 
of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. 
The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: 
What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!" 
The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farm- 
ers on their day of rest at the end of the week, — for 
Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spent week, and not 
the fresh and brave beginning of a new one, — with this 
one other draggletail of a sermon, should shout with 
thundering voice, — "Pause! Avast! Why so seeming 
fast, but deadly slow?" 

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, 
while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe 
realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, 
life, to compare it with such things as we know, would 
be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertain- 
ments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has 
a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the 
streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive 
that only great and worthy things have any permanent 
and absolute existence, — that petty fears and petty 
pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is 
aways exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes 



' ' WHERE I LIVED, AND WHAT I LIVED FOR. 81 

and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, 
men establish and confirm their dail_y life of I'outine and 
habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory 
foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true 
law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to 
live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by 
experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo 
book that "There was a king's son, who, being expelled 
in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a 
forester, and, growing up to maturity in that state, 
imagined himself to belong to the iDarbarous race with 
which he lived. One of his father's ministers having 
discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the 
misconception of his character was removed, and he 
knew himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the 
Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances in which 
it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth 
is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows 
itself to be Brahme." I perceive that we inhabitants 
of New England live this mean life that we do because 
our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We 
think that that is which appears to be. If a man should 
walk through this town and see only the reality, where, 
think you, would the "Mill-dam" go to? If he should 
give us an account of the realities he beheld there, we 
should not recognize the place in his description. Look 
at a meeting-house, or a courthouse, or a jail, or a shop, 
or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is 
before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in 
j^our account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in 
the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, 
before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there 
is indeed something true and sublime. But all these 
times and places and occasions are now and here. God 
Himself culminates in the present moment, and* will 
never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And 
we are enabled to apprehend at ail what is sublime and 
noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of 
the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly 
and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we 
travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend 



82 WALDEN. 

our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist 
never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his 
posterity at least could accomplish it. 

Let us spend one clay as deliberately as Nature, and 
not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mos- 
quito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and 
fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; 
let company come and let company go, let the bells ring 
and the children cry, — determined to make a day of it. 
Why should we knock under and go with the stream? 
Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible 
rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the merid- 
ian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, 
for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxecl 
nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another 
way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, 
let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell 
rings, v/hy should we run? We will consider what kind 
of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work 
and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush 
of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion and 
appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through 
Paris and London, through New York and Boston and 
Concord, through church and state, through poetry and 
philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard l^ottom and 
rocks in place, which we can call realitij, and say, This is, 
and no mistake; and then begin, having a point cVappui, 
below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might 
found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or 
perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, 
that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams 
and appearances had gathered from time to time. If 
you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will 
see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a 
cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the 
heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude 
your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only 
reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle 
in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are 
alive, let us go about our business. 

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at 



READING. 83 

it; but while I drink I sec the sandy bottom and detect 
how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but 
eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the 
sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count 
one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet, I have 
always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day 
I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and 
rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to 
be any more busy with ni}^ hands than is necessary. 
My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties 
concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head 
is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their 
snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and bur- 
row my way through these hills. I think that the richest 
vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod 
and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to 
mine. 

III. 

READING. 

With a little more deliberation in the choice of their 
pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially 
students and observers, for certainly their nature and 
destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating 
property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a 
family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are 
mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, 
and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest 
Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the 
veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trem- 
bling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh 
a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so 
bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. 
No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed 
since that divinity was revealed. That time which we 
really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, 
present, nor future. 

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, 
but to serious reading, than a university; and though 



84 WALDEN. 

I was be^'ond the range of the ordinary circulating 
hbrary, I had more than ever come withm the influence 
of those books which circulate round the world, whose 
sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely 
copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the 
poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, "Being seated to run 
through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this 
advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass 
of wine; I have experienced this pleasure wdien I have 
drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." I kept 
Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though 
I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant 
labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish 
and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study 
impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of 
such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books 
of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employ- 
ment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where 
it was then that / lived. 

The student may read Homer or ^schylus in the 
Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, 
for it implies that he in some measure emulate their 
heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. 
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of 
our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead 
to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the 
meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger 
.sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and 
valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and 
fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to 
bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They 
seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed 
as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of 
youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some 
words of an ancient language, which are raised out of 
the trivialncss of the street, to be perpetual suggestions 
and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer 
remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he 
has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the 
classics would at length make way for more modern 
and practical studies; but the adventurous student will 



READING. 85 

always stud}- classics, in whatever language they may be 
written and however ancient they ma}' be. For what are 
the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? 
They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and 
there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in 
them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as 
w^ell omit to study Nature because she is old. To read 
well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble 
exercise, and one that will task the reader more than 
any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It 
requires a training such as the athletes underAvent, the 
steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. 
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as 
they were written. It is not enough even to be able to 
speak the language of that nation by which they are 
written, for there is a memorable interval between the 
spoken and the written language, the language heard 
and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, 
a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and 
we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. 
The other is the maturity and experience of that; if 
that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a 
reserved and select expression, too significant to be 
heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order 
to sjDeak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the 
Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not 
entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of 
genius written in those languages; for these were not 
written in that Greek or Latin which the}' knew, but 
in the select language of literature. They had not 
learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the 
very materials on which they were written were waste 
paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap con- 
temporary literature. But when the several nations 
of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written 
languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of 
their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and 
scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness 
the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian 
multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few 
scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it. 



86 WALDEN. 

However much we may admire the orator's occasional 
bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are com- 
monly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language 
as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. 
There are the stars, and they who can' may read them. 
The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. 
They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and 
vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum 
is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The 
orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, 
and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear 
him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his 
occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and 
the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the in- 
tellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can 
understand him. 

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him 
on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word 
is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more 
intimate with us and more universal than any other 
work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. 
It may be translated into every language, and not only 
be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — 
not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be 
carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of 
an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's 
speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the 
monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, 
only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have 
carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into 
all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. 
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit 
inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the 
oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on 
the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of 
their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain 
the reader his common sense will not refuse them. ' Their 
authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every 
society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an 
influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps 
scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry 



READING. 87 

his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted 
to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably 
at last to those still higher but j'ct inaccessible circles of 
intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfec- 
tion of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of 
all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the 
pains which he takes to secure for his children that in- 
tellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus 
it is that he becomes the founder of a family. 

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics 
in the language in which they were written must have a 
very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human 
race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has 
ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civ- 
ilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. 
Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor ^schy- 
lus, nor Virgil even, — works as refined, as solidly done, 
and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later 
writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, 
if ever, ecjualled the elaborate beauty and finish and the 
lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They 
only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. 
It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the 
learning and the genius which will enable us to attend 
to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed 
when those relics which we call Classics, and the still 
older and more than classic but even less known Scrip- 
tures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, 
when the Vaticans shall l^e filled with ^'edas and Zend- 
avestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shak- 
speares, and all the centuries to come shall have succes- 
sively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. 
By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last. 

The works of the great poets have never yet been read 
by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They 
have only been read as the multitude read the stars, 
at most astrologicalh', not astronomically. Most men 
have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as 
they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts 
and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble 
intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this 



88 WALDEN. 

only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us 
as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the 
while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and 
devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. 

I think that having learned our letters we should 
read the best that is in literature, and not be forever 
repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the 
fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost 
form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or 
hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the 
wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of 
their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what 
is called easy reading. There is a work in several volumes 
in our Circulating Library entitled Little Reading, which 
I thought referred to a town of that name which I had 
not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and 
ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest 
dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing 
to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide 
this provender, they are the machines to read it. They 
read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Se- 
phronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved 
before, and neither did the course of their true love run 
smooth, — at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and 
get up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got 
up on to a steeple, who had l^etter never have gone up 
as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got 
him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all 
the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he 
did get down again! For my part, I think that they had 
better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal 
noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put 
heroes among the constellations, and let them swing 
round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all 
to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time 
the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the 
meeting-house burn down. "The Skip of the Tip-Toe- 
Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated 
author of ' Tittle-Tol-Tan,' to appear in monthly parts; 
a great rush; don't all come together." All this they 
read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, 



READING. 89 

and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even 
yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old 
bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella, — 
without any improvement, that I can see, in the pro- 
nunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill 
in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is 
dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, 
and a general deliciuium and sloughing off of all the in- 
tellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked 
daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and- 
Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market. 
The best books are not read even by those who are 
called good readers. What does our Concord culture 
amount to? Tliere is in this town, with a very few ex- 
ceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books 
even in English literature, whose words all can read and 
spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally 
educated men here and elsewhere have really little or 
no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for 
the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics 
and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know 
of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made 
to Ijecome acc[uainted with them. I know' a woodchopper, 
of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news 
as he says, for he is above that, but to " keep himself in 
practice," he being a Canadian b}^ birth; and when I 
ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in 
this world, he says, besides this, to keep up and add to 
his English. This is about as much as the college-bred 
generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English 
paper for the purpose. One who has just come from 
reading perhaps one of the best English books will find 
how many with whom he can converse about it? Or 
suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic 
in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so- 
called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, 
but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly 
the professor in our colleges who, if he has mastered the 
difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered 
the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Cireek poet, 
and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic 



90 WALDEN. 

reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of 
mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? 
Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews 
have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go con- 
siderably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but 
here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity 
have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every suc- 
ceeding age have assured us of; — and yet we learn to 
read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class- 
books, and when we leave school, the " Little Reading," 
and story books, which are for boys and beginners; 
and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are 
all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and 
manikins. 

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this 
our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly 
known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never 
read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I 
never saw him, — my next neighbor and I never heard 
him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But 
how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what 
was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I 
never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and 
illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not riake any 
very broad distinction between the illiteratencss of my 
townsman who cannot read at all, and the illitcrateness 
of him who has learned to read only what is for children 
and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies 
of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they 
were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little 
higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of 
the daily paper. 

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. 
There are probably words addressed to our condition 
exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, 
would be more salutary than the morning or the spring 
to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face 
of things for us. How many a man has dated a new 
era in his life from the reading of a book. The book 
exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles 
and reveal new ones. The at ]:)resent unutterable things 



READING. 91 

we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions 
that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their 
turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been 
omitted; and each has answered them, according to 
his ability, by his words and his life. Moreover, with 
wisdom we shall learn liberality. The solitary hired man 
on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had 
his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and 
is driven as he believes into silent gravity and exclusive- 
ness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, 
thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had 
the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be 
universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is 
even said to have invented and established worship 
among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster 
then, and, through the liberalizing influence of all the 
worthies, with Jesus Christ Himself, and let "our church" 
go l)y the board. 

We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century 
and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. 
But consider how little this village does for its own cul- 
ture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be 
flattered by them, for that will not advance either of 
us. We need to be provoked, — goaded like oxen, as we 
are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent sys- 
tem of common schools, schools for infants only; but 
excepting the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and 
latterly the puny beginning of a library suggested by 
the state, no school for ourselves. We spend more on 
almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on 
our mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon 
schools, that we did not leave off our education when we 
begin to be men and women. It is time that villages 
were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows 
of universities, with leisure — if they are indeed so well 
off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. 
Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford 
forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a 
liberal education under the skies of Concord? Can we 
not hire some Abelard to lecture to us? Alas! what with 
foddering the cattle and tending the store, we are kept 



92 WALDEX. 

from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected. 
In this country, the village should in some respects take 
the place of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the 
patron of the fine arts. It is rich enough. It wants 
only the magnanimity and refinement. It can spend 
money enough on such things as farmers and traders 
value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending 
money for things which more intelligent men know to be 
of far more worth. This town has spent seventeen 
thousand dollars on a town-house, thank fortune or 
politics, but proljably it will not spend so much on living 
wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred 
years. The one hundred and twenty-five dollars an- 
nually subscril^ed for a Lyceum in the winter is better 
spent than any other equal sum raised in the town. 
If we live in the nineteenth century, why should we not 
enjoy the advantages which the nineteenth century 
offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? 
If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of 
Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at 
once? — not be sucking the pap of "neutral family" 
papers, or browsing "Olive Branches" here in New 
England. Let the reports of all the learned societies 
come to us, and we will see if they know anything. Why 
should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding 
& Co. to select our reading? As the nobleman of culti- 
vated taste surrounds himself with whatever conduces 
to his culture, — genius — learning — wit — books — paint- 
ings — statuary — music — philosophical instruments, and 
the like; so let the village do, — not stop short at a peda- 
gogue, a parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three 
selectmen, because our pilgrim forefathers got through 
a cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To act 
collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions ; 
and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more 
flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman's. 
New England can hire all the wise men in the world 
to come and teach her, and board them round the while, 
and not be provincial at all. That is the uncommon 
school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have 
noble villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge 



SOUXDS. 93 

ever the river, go round a little there, and throw one 
arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which 
surrounds us. 

IV. 

SOUNDS. 

But while we are confined to books, though the most 
select and classic, and read only particular written 
languages, which are themselves but dialects and pro- 
vincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language 
which all things and events speak without metaphor, 
which alone is coj)ious and standard. Much is pub- 
lished, but little printed. The raj's which stream through 
the shutter will be no longer remembered when the 
shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline 
can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert-. 
What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, 
no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the 
most admirable routine of life, compared with the dis- 
cipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will 
you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your 
fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. 

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. 
Nay, I often did better than this. There were times 
when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the 
present moment to any work, whether of the head or 
hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes,. 
in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed 
bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, 
rapt in a re very, amidst the pines and hickories and 
sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while 
the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the 
house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or 
the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant high- 
"w^ay, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in 
those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far 
better than any work of the hands would have been. 
They were not time subtracted from my life, but so 
much over and above my usual allowance. I realized 



94 WALDEN. 

what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the 
forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not 
how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light 
some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is 
evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. In- 
stead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my 
incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, 
sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle 
or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my 
nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing 
the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced 
into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I 
lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that ''for 
yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow they have only one 
word, and they express the variety of meaning by point- 
ing backward for yesterday, forward for to-morrow, 
and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer 
idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the 
birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should 
not have been found wanting. A man must find his 
occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very 
calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. 

I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, 
over those who were obliged to look abroad for amuse- 
ment, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was 
become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. 
It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. 
If we were always indeed getting our living, and regulat- 
ing our lives according to the last and best mode we had 
learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Fol- 
low your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to 
show you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was 
a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose 
early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the 
grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed 
water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the 
pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and 
white; and by the time the villagers had broken their 
fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently 
to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were 
almost uninterrupted. It was pleasant to see my whole 



SOUNDS. 95 

household effects out on the grass, making a little pile 
like a gypsy's pack, and my three-legged table, from 
which I did not remove the books and pen and ink, 
standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed 
glad to get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be 
brought in. I was sometimes tempted to stretch aii 
awning over them and take my seat there. It was worth 
the while to see the sun shine on these things, and hear 
the free wind blow on them; so much more interesting 
most familiar objects look out doors than in the house. 
A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows 
under the table, and blackb'erry vines run round its legs; 
pine cones, chestnut burs, and strawberry leaves are 
strewn about. It looked as if this was the way these v 
forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables, 
chairs, and bedstead, — because they once stood in their 
midst. 

My house was on the side of a hill, immediate^ on 
the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young- 
forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen 
rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down 
the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, black- 
berry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, 
shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut. 
Near the end of May, the sand-cherry {cerasus putnila) 
adorned the sides of the path with its delicate flowers 
arranged in umbels cylindrically about its short stems, 
which last, in the fall, weighed down with good-sized 
and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on 
every side. I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, 
though they were scarcely palatable. The sumach 
(rhus glabra) grew luxuriantly about the house, pushing 
up through the embankment which I had made, and 
growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad 
pinnate tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to 
look on. The large buds, suddenly pushing out late 
in the spring from dry sticks which had seemed to be 
dead, developed themselves as by magic into graceful 
green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter; and some- 
times, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow 
and tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender 



96 WALDEN. 

bough suddenl}^ fall like a fan to the ground, when there 
was not a breath of air stirring, broken otf by its own 
weight. In August, the large masses of berries, which, 
when in flower, had attracted many wild bees, gradually 
fissumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their 
weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs. 

As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks 
are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, 
flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching 
restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house, 
gives a voice to the air; a fishhawk dimples the glassy 
surface of the pond and bi''in"gs up a fish; a mink steals 
out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by 
the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the 
reed-bircls flitting hither and thither; and for the last half 
hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying 
away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, 
conveying travellers from Boston to the country. For 
I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as I 
hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, 
but erelong ran away and came home again, ciuite down 
at the heel and homesick. He had never seen such a 
dull and out-of-the-way place; the folks were all gone 
off; why, you couldn't even hear the whistle! I doubt 
if there is such a place in Massachusetts now: — 

" In truth, our village has become a butt 
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er 
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is — Concord." 

The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a 
hundred rods south of where I dwell. I usually go to 
the village along its causewa}'', and am, as it were, re- 
lated to society by this link. The men on the freight 
trains, who go over the whole length of the road, bow to 
me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and 
apparently they take me for an employee; and so I 
am. I too would fain be a track-repairer somewhere 
in the orbit of the earth. 

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods 
summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk 
sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many 



SOUXDS. 97 

restless city merchants are arriving within the circle 
of the town, or adventurous country traders from the 
other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout 
their warning to get off the track to the other, heard 
sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come 
your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen I 
Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he 
can say them nay. And here's your pay for them I 
screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long bat- 
tering rams going twenty miles an hour against the 
city's walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary 
and heavy laden that dwell within them. With such 
huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair 
to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, 
all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up 
comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes 
the silk, down goes the woolen; up come the books, but' 
down goes the wit that writes them. 

When I meet the engine with its train of cars mov- 
ing off with planetary motion, — or, rather, like a comet, 
for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and 
with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since 
its orbit does not look like a returning curve, — with 
its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden 
and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I 
have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to 
the light, — as if this travelling demigod, this cloud- 
compeller, ' would erelong take the sunset sky for the 
livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the 
hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth 
with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his 
nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they 
will put into the new Mythology I don't know), it seems 
as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. 
If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their 
servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over 
the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as 
beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields, 
then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully 
accompany men on'their errands and be their escort. 

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the 



98 WALDEN-. 

same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is 
hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching 
far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven 
while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for 
a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a 
celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which 
hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler 
of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by 
the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and 
harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early 
to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the 
enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow 
lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the 
giant plough plough a furrow from the mountains to 
the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill- 
barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating mer- 
chandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed 
flies over the country, stopping only that his master 
may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant 
snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the 
woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; 
and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, 
to start once more on his travels without rest or slum- 
ber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable 
blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he 
may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a 
few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as 
heroic and commanding as it is protracted and un- 
wearied ! 

Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of 
towns, where once only the hunter penetrated by day, 
in the darkest night dart these bright saloons without 
the knowledge of their inhabitants; this moment stopping 
at some brilliant station-house in town or city, where 
a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal Swamp, 
scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals 
of the cars are now the epochs in the village day. They 
go and come with such regularity and precision, and their 
;vhistle can be heard so far, that the farmers set their 
clocks by them, and thus one well-cOnducted institution 
regulates a whole country. Have not men improved 



SOUNDS. 99 

somev;hat in punctuality since the railroad was invented? 
Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they 
did in the stage-office? There is something electrifying 
in the atmosphere of the former place. I have been 
astonished at the miracles it has wrought; that some of 
my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied, once for 
all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a con- 
veyance, are on hand when the bell rings. To do things 
"railroad fashion" is now the by-word; and it is worth 
the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any 
power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read 
the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this 
case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that 
never turns aside. (Let that be the name of your engine.) 
Men are advertised that at a certain hour and minute 
these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the 
compass.; yet it interferes with no man's business, and 
the children go to school on the other track. We live 
the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons 
of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path 
but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own 
track, then. 

Wliat recommends commerce to me is its enterprise 
and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to 
Jupiter. I see these men every day go about their 
business with more or less courage and content, doing 
more even than they suspect, and perchance better 
employed than they could have consciously devised. 
I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half 
an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the 
steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the 
snow-plough for their winter quarters; who have not 
merel}^ the three o'clock in the morning courage, which 
Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage 
does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when 
the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. 
On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which 
is still raging and chilling men's blood, I hear the muffled 
tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their 
chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, 
without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New 



100 WALDEN. 

England northeast snow storm, and I behold the plough- 
men covered with snow and rime, their heads peering 
above the mould-board which is turning down other 
than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like boulders 
of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in 
the universe. 

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, 
alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural 
in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic 
enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its 
singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the 
freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores 
which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long 
Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign 
parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical 
climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like 
a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which 
will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next 
summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoa-nut husks, the old 
junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This 
carload of torn sails is more legible and interesting now 
than if they should be wrought into paper and printed 
books. Who can write so graphically the history of 
the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? 
They are proof-sheets which need no correction. Here 
goes lumber from the Maine woods, which did not go 
out to sea in the last freshet, risen four dollars on the 
thousand because of what did go out or was split up: 
pine, spruce, cedar, — first, second, third, and fourth 
qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the 
bear, and moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston 
lime, a prime lot, which will get far among the hills 
before it gets slacked. These rags in bales, of all hues 
and qualities, the lowest condition to which cotton and 
linen descend, the final result of dress, — of patterns 
which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Mil- 
waukee, as those splendid articles, English, French, or 
American prints, ginghams, muslins, &c., gathered from 
all quarters both of fashion and poverty, going to be- 
come paper of one color or a few shades only, on which 
forsooth will be written tales of real life, high and low, 



SOUNDS. 101 

and founded on fact! This closed car smells of salt fish, 
the strong New England and commercial scent, remind- 
ing me of the Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has 
not seen a salt fish, thoroughly cured for this world, so 
that nothing can spoil it, and putting the perseverance of 
the saints to the blush? with which you may sweep or 
pave the streets, and split j^our kindlings, and the teamster 
shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and 
rain behind it, — and the trader, as a Concord trader 
once did, hang it up by his door for a sign when he com- 
mences business, until at last his oldest customer cannot 
tell surely whether it be animal, vegetable, or mineral, 
and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake, and if it be 
put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent 
dun fish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, 
with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle 
of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were 
careering over the pampas of the Spanish main, — a 
type of all obstinac}', and evincing how almost hopeless 
and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess that, 
practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real 
disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better 
or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals 
say, "A cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound 
round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor 
bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form." 
The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as these tails 
exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe is what 
is usually done with them, and then they will stay put 
and stick. Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy 
directed to John Smith, Cuttingsville, Vermont, some 
trader among the Green Mountains, who imports for the 
farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands over 
his bulk-head and thinks of the last arrivals on the 
coast, how they may affect the price for him, telling his 
customers this moment, as he has told them twenty 
times lief ore this morning, that he expects some by the 
next train of prime ciuality. It is advertised in the Cut- 
tingsville Times. 

AVhile these things go up other things come down. 
Warned by the whizzing sound, I look up from my book 



102 WALDEN. 

and see some tall pine, hewn on far northern hills, which 
has winged its way over the Green Mountains and the 
Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the township 
within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds 
it; going 

" to be the mast 
Of some great ammiral." 

' And hark! here comes the cattle-train bearing the cattle 
of a thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cow-yards in 
the air, drovers wdth their sticks, and shepherd boys 
in the midst of their flocks, all but the mountain pastures, 
whirled along like leaves blown from the mountains by 
the September gales. The air is filled with the bleating 
of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as if a 
pastoral valley were going by. When the old bell- 
wether at the head rattles his bell, the mountains do 
indeed skip like rams and the little hills hke lambs. 
A car-load of drovers, too, in the midst, on a level with 
their droves now, their vocation gone, but still clinging 
to their useless sticks as their badge of office. But their 
dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them; they 
are quite thrown out; they have lost the scent. Me- 
thinks I hear them barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, 
or panting up the western slope of the Green Mountains. 
They will not be in at the death. Their vocation, too, 
is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par now. 
They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or per- 
chance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and 
the fox. So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. 

iBut the bell rings, and I must get off the track and let 

' the cars go by: — 

What's the railroad to me? 

I never go to see 

Where it ends. 

It fills a few hollows, 

And makes banks for the swallows, 

It sets the sand a-blowing, 

And the blackberries a-growing, 

but I cross it like a cart-path in the woods. I will not 
have my eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke 
and steam and hissing. 



SOUNDS. 103 

Xow that the cars are gone by and all the restless 
world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer 
feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever. For 
the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps, my meditations 
are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a carriage or 
team along the distant highway. 

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lin- 
coln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, Avhen the wind 
was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural 
melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a 
sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires 
a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the 
horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All 
sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces 
one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal 
lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant 
ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint 
it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody 
which the air had strained, and which had conversed 
with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of 
the sound which the elements had taken up and modu- 
lated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to 
some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic 
and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what 
was W'Orth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice 
of the wood ; the same trivial words and notes sung by a 
wood-nymph. 

At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the 
horizon beyond the woods sounded sweet and melodious, 
and at first I would mistake it for the voices of certain 
minstrels by whom I was sometimes serenaded, who 
might be straying over hill and dale; but soon I was not 
unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into 
the cheap and natural music of the cow. I do not mean 
to be satirical, but to express my appreciation of those 
youths' singing, when I state that I perceived clearly 
that it was akin to the music of the cow, and they were 
at length one articulation of Nature. 

Regularly at half-past seven, in one part of the sum- 
mer, after the evening train had gone by, the whippoor- 
wills chanted their vespers for half an hour, sitting on a 



104 WALDEX. 

stump by my door, or upon the ridge pole of the house. 
They would begin to sing almost with as much precision 
as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time, 
referred to the setting of the sun, ever}- evening. I had 
a rare opportunity to become accpiainted with their 
habits. Sometimes I heard four or five at once in dif- 
ferent parts of the wood, by accident one a bar behind 
another, and so near me that I distinguished not onh' 
the cluck after each note, but often that singular buzzing 
sound like a fly in a spider's web, only proportionally 
louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round 
me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a 
string, when probably I was near its eggs. They sang 
at intervals throughout the night, and were again as 
musical as ever just before and about dawn. 

When other birds are still the screech owls take up 
the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-lu-lu. 
Their dismal scream is truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise 
midnight hags! It is no honest and blunt tu-whit tu-who 
of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn grave- 
yard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers 
remembering the pangs and delights of supernal love in 
the infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, 
their doleful responses, trilled along the woodside; re- 
minding me sometimes of music and singing birds; as 
if it were the dark and tearful side of music, the regrets 
and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the spirits, 
the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen 
souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth 
and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins 
with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of 
their transgressions. They give me a new sense of the 
variety and capacity of that nature which is our common 
dwelling. Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been hor-r-r-r-n! 
sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the 
restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray 
oaks. Then — that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n! echoes 
another on the farther side with tremulous sincerity, 
and — bor-7'-r-r-n! comes faintly from far in the Lincoln 
woods. 

I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand 



SOUNDS. 105 

you could fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, 
as if she meant by this to stereot^^pe and make permanent 
in her choir the dying moans of a human being,— some 
])oor weak relic of mortality who has left hope behind, and 
howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on entering 
the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling 
melodiousness, — I find myself beginning with the letters 
gl when I try to imitate it, — expressive of a mind which 
has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortifica- 
tion of all healthy and courageous thought. It reminded 
me of ghouls and idiots and insane howlings. But now 
one answers from far woods in a strain made really 
melodious by distance, — Hoo hoo hoo hoorer hoo; and 
indeed for the most part it suggested only pleasing 
associations, whether heard by day or night, summer or 
winter. 

I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic 
and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably 
suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day 
illustrates,' suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature 
which men have not recognized. They represent the 
stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. 
All day the sun has shone on the surface of some savage 
swamp, where the single spruce stands hung with usnea 
lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chick- 
adee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and 
rabbit skulk beneath; but now a more dismal and fitting 
day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to 
express the meaning of Nature there. 

Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of 
wagons over bridges, — a sound heard farther than almost 
any other at night, — the baying of dogs, and some- 
times again the lowing of some disconsolate cow in a 
distant barn-yard. In the meanwhile all the shore rang 
with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of ancient 
wine-bibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying 
to sing a catch in their Stygian lake, — if the Walden 
nymphs will pardon the comparison, for though there 
are almost no weeds, there are frogs there, — who would 
fain keep up the hilarious rules of their old festal tables, 
though their voices have waxed hoarse and solemnly 



106 WALDEN. 

grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor, 
and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and 
sweet intoxication never comes to drown the memory 
of the past, but mere saturation and waterloggedness 
and distention. The most aldermanic, with his chin 
upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his drooling 
chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught 
of the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with 
the ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and 
straightway comes over the water from some distant 
cove the same password repeated, where the next in 
seniority and girth has gulped down to his mark; and 
when this observance has made the circuit of the shores, 
then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfac- 
tion, tr-r-r-oonk! and each in his turn repeats the same 
down to the least distended, leakiest, and flabbiest- 
paunched, that there be no mistake; and then the bowl 
goes round again and again, until the sun disperses the 
morning mist, and- only the patriarch is not under the 
pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and 
pausing for a reply. 

I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cock- 
crowing from my clearing, and I thought that it might 
be worth the while to keep a cockerel for his music 
merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once wild 
Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of 
any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without 
being domesticated, it would soon become the most 
famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of 
the goose and the hooting of the owl; and then imagine 
the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses when their 
lords' clarions rested! No wonder that man added this 
bird to his tame stock, — to say nothing of the eggs and 
drumsticks. To walk in a winter morning in a wood 
where these birds abounded, their native woods, and 
hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill 
for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler 
notes of other birds, — think of it! It would put nations 
on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise 
earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till 
he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? 



SOUNDS. 107 

This foreign bird's note is celebrated by the poets of all 
countries along with the notes of their native songsters. 
All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more 
indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever 
good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even 
the sailor on the Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by 
his voice; but its shrill sound never roused me from my 
slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, 
so that you would have said there was a deficiency of 
domestic sound; neither the churn, nor the spinning- 
wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing 
of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old- 
fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of 
ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they 
^vere starved out, or rather were never baited in, — only 
squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill 
on the ridge pole, a blue-jay screaming beneath the win- 
dow, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech- 
owl or a cat-owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laugh- 
ing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. 
Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, 
ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens 
to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced Nature 
reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing 
up under your windows, and wild sumachs and black- 
berry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy 
pitch-pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles 
for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the 
house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the 
gale, — a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots 
behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the 
front-yard gate in the Great Snow, — no gate — no front- 
yard, — and no path to the civiHzed world! 



108 WALDEN. 

V. 

SOLITUDE. 

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is 
one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. 
I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part 
of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond 
in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy 
and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all 
the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bull- 
frogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the 
whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the 
water. S3anpathy with the fluttering alder and poplar 
leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, 
my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small 
waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from 
storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is 
now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, 
the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest 
with their notes. The repose is never complete. The 
wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; 
the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and 
woods without fear. They are Nature's watchmen, — 
links which connect the days of animated life. 

When I return to my house I find that visitors have 
been there and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, 
or a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow 
walnut leaf or a chip. They who come rarely to the 
woods take some little piece of the forest into their hands 
to play with by the way, which they leave, either in- 
tentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow 
wand, woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. 
I could always tell if visitors had called in my absence, 
either by the bended twigs or grass, or the print of their 
shoes, and generally of what sex or age or quality they 
were by some shght trace left, as a flower dropped, or 
a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as far 
off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering 



SOLITUDE. 109 

odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified 
of the passage of a traveller along the highway sixt}' 
rods off by the scent of his pipe. 

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our 
horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood 
is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat 
is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated 
and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. 
For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some 
square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, 
abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a 
mile distant, and no house is visible from any place but 
the hill tops wathin half a mile of my own. I have my 
horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view 
of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, 
and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the 
other. But for the most part it is as solitary where I live 
as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New 
England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon 
and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night 
there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked 
at my door, more than if I were the first or last man; 
unless it were in the spring, when at long intervals some 
came from the village to fish for pouts, — they plainly 
fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own 
natures, and baited their hooks with darkness, — but 
they soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left 
*Hhe world to darkness and to me," and the black kernel 
of the night was never profaned by any human neigh- 
borhood. I believe that men are generally still a little 
afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, 
and Christianity and candles have been introduced. 

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet 
and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society 
may be found in any natural object, even for the poor 
misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be 
no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst 
of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet 
such a storm but it was iEolian music to a healthy and 
innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple 
and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the 



110 WALDEN. 

friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make 
hfe a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my 
beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and 
melancholy, but good for me, too. Though it prevents 
my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. 
If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot 
in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, 
it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, 
being good for the grass, it would be good for me. Some- 
times, when I compare myself with other men, it seems 
as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond 
any deserts that I am conscious of ; as if I had a warrant 
and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, 
and were especialh' guided and guarded. I do not 
flatter mj'self, but if it be possible they flatter me. I 
have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by 
a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks 
after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted 
if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a 
serene and healthy life. To bd alone was something 
unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of 
a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my 
recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these 
thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such 
sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very 
pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight 
around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friend- 
liness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as 
made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood 
insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. 
Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with 
sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made 
aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even 
in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and 
dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and 
humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought 
no place could ever be strange to me again. — 



"Mourning untimely consumes the sad; 
Few are their days in the land of the living, 
Beautiful daughter of Toscar." 



SOLITUDE. Ill 

Some of my plcasantcst hours were during the long 
rain storms in the spring or fall, which confined me to 
the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon, 
soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an 
early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many 
thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. 
In those driving northeast rains which tried the village 
houses so, when the maids stood ready with mop and 
pail in front entries to keep the deluge out, I sat behind 
my door in my little house, which was all entry, and 
thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy thun- 
der shower the lightning struck a large pitch-pine across 
the pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly 
regular spiral groove from top to bottom, an inch or 
more deep, and four or five inches wide, as you would 
groove a walking-stick. I passed it again the other 
day, and was struck with awe on looking up and be- 
holding that mark, now more distinct than ever, where 
a terrific and resistless bolt came down out of the harmless 
sky eight years ago. ' Men frec^uently say to me, " I 
should think \o\x would feel lonesome down there, and 
want to be nearer to folks, rain}' and snowy days and 
nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such, — 
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. 
How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant 
inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk 
cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Why should 
I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This 
which 3'ou put seems to me not to be the most important 
question. What sort of space is that which separates 
a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have 
found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds 
much nearer to one another. What do we want most 
to dwell near to? Not to many men surety, the depot, the 
post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school- 
house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, 
where men most congregate, but to the perennial source 
of our life, whence in all our experience we have found 
that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and 
sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with 
different natures, but this is the place where a wise man 



112 WALDEN. 

will dig his cellar. ... I one evening overtook one of 
my townsmen, who has accumulated what is called 
"a handsome property," — though I never got a fair 
view of it, — on the Walden road, driving a pair of cattle 
to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my 
mind to give up so many of the comforts of life. I 
answered that I was very sure I liked it passably well; 
I was not joking. And so I went home to my bed, and 
left him to pick his way through the darkness and the 
mud to Brighton, — or Bright-town, — which place he 
would reach sometime in the morning. 

Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a 
dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The 
place where that may occur is always the same, and in- 
describably pleasant to all our senses. For the most 
part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances 
to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause 
of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power 
which fashions their being. A^ext to us the grandest 
laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not 
the workman wdiom we have hired, with whom we love 
so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are. 

" How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile 
powers of Heaven and of Earth! " 

"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them; 
we seek to hear them, and we do not hear them; identified 
with the substance of things, they cannot be separated 
from them." 

"The}^ cause that in all the universe men purify and 
sanctify their hearts, and clothe themselves in their 
holiday garments to offer sacrifices and oblations to 
their ancestors. It is an ocean of subtile intelligences. 
They are everywhere, above us, on our left, on our right; 
they environ us on all sides." 

We are the subjects of an experiment which is not 
a little interesting to me. Can we not do without the 
society of our gossips a little while under these circum- 
stances, — have our own thoughts to cheer us? Con- 
fucius says truly, " Virtue does not remain as an aban- 
doned orphan; it must of necessity have neighbors." 

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane 



SOLITUDE. 113 

sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand 
aloof from actions and their consequences; and all 
things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are 
not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the 
driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking 
down on it. I- may be affected by a theatrical exhibi- 
tion; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an 
actual event which appears to concern me much more. 
I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so 
to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible 
of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote 
from myself as from another. However intense my 
experience, I am conscious of the presence of and criti- 
cism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of 
me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking 
note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When 
the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the specta- 
tor goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of 
the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This 
doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends 
sometimes. 

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of 
the time. To be in company, even with the best, is 
soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. 
I never found the companion that was so companionable 
as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when 
we go abroad among men than when we stay in our 
chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, 
let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by 
the miles of space that intervene between a man and his 
fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded 
hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish 
in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field 
or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel 
lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes 
home at night he cannot sit down in a room "alone, at the 
mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see 
the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, 
himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders 
how the student can sit alone in the house all night and 
most of the day without ennui and "the blues;" but he 



114 WALDEN. 

does not realize that the student, though in the house, 
is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, 
as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation 
and society that the latter does, though it may be a more 
condensed form of it. 

Society is commonly too cheap. Wq meet at very 
short intervals, not having had time to acquire any 
new value for each other. We meet at meals three times 
a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty 
cheese that we are. We have to agree on a certain set 
of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this 
frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come 
to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the 
sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live 
■thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one 
another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for 
one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice 
for all important and hearty communications. Con- 
sider the girls in a factory, — never alone, hardly in their 
dreams. It would be better if there were but one in- 
habitant to a square mile, as where I live. The value 
of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him. 

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying 
of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose 
loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with 
which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagina- 
tion surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. 
So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, 
we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal 
and natural society, and come to know that we are never 
alone. 

I have a great deal of company in my house; es- 
pecially in the morning, when nobody calls. Let me 
suggest a few comparisons, that some one may convey 
an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the 
loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden 
Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I 
pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue 
angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters. The sun is 
alone, except in thick weather, when there sometimes 
appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone, — ■ 



SOLITUDE. 115 

but the devil, he is far from Ijeiiig alone; he sees a great 
deal of company; he is legion. I am no more lonely 
than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean 
leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no 
more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or 
the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, 
or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. 

I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, 
when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, 
from an old settler and original proprietor, who is re- 
ported to have dug Walden Poncl, and stoned it, and 
fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old 
time and of new eternity; and between us we manage 
to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant 
views of things, even without apples or cider, — a most 
wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who 
keeps himself more seci-et than ever did Goffe or Whalley; 
and though he is thought to be dead, none can show 
where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my 
neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous 
herb garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples 
and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of un- 
equalled fertility, and her memory runs back farther 
than mythology, and she can tell me the original of 
every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for 
the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy 
and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and 
seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet. 

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, — 
of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such 
health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sym- 
pathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature 
would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and 
the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain 
tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put pn mourn- 
ing in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just 
cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the 
earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould 
myself? 

What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, con- 
tented? Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our 



116 WALDEN. 

great-grandmother Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic 
medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, 
outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health 
with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead 
of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from 
Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those 
long shallow black-schooner-looking wagons which we 
sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught 
of vmdiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will 
not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, why, 
then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, 
for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription 
ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, 
it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest 
cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow 
westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of 
Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor 
iEsculapius, and who is represented on monuments 
holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup 
out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather 
of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter 
of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of 
restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was 
probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, 
and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and 
wherever she came it was spring. 



VI. 

VISITORS. 

I THINK that I love society as much as most, and am 
ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the 
time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. 
I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the 
sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called 
me thither. 

I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two 
for friendship, three for society. When visitors came 
in larger and unexpected numbers, there was but the 



VISITORS. 117 

third chair for thorn all, but they generally economized 
the room by standing up. It is surprising how many 
great men and women a small house will contain. I have 
had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at 
once under my roof, and yet we often parted without 
being aware that we had come very near to one another. 
Many of our houses, both public and private, with their 
almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their 
cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of 
peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their in- 
habitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the 
latter seem to be only vermin which infest them. I am 
surprised when the herald blows his summons before 
some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come 
creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous 
mouse, which soon again slinks into some hole in the 
pavement. 

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so 
small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient 
distance from my guest when we began to utter the big 
thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts 
to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before 
they make their port. The bullet of your thought must 
have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen 
into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear 
of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the 
side of his head. Also our sentences wanted room to 
unfold and forai their columns in the interval. In- 
dividuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and 
natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, 
between them. I have found it a singular luxury to 
talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. 
In my house we were so near that we could not begin to 
hear, — we could not speak low enough to be heard; 
as when you throw two stones into calm water so near 
that they break each other's undulations. If we are 
merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford 
to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel 
each other's breath; but if we speak reservedly and 
thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all animal 
heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. 



118 WALDEX. 

If wo would enjoy the most intimate societ}^ with that 
in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken 
to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart 
bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other's voice in 
any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for the con- 
venience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are 
many fine things which we cannot say if we have to 
shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier 
and grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther 
apart till they touched the wall in opposite corners, and 
then commonly there was not room enough. 

My ''best" room, however, my withdrawing room, 
always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun 
rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thither 
in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I 
took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and 
dusted the furniture and kept the things in order. 

If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal 
meal and it was no interruption to conversation to be 
stirring a hasty pudding, or watching the rising and 
maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in the mean- 
while. But if twenty came and sat in my house, there 
was nothing said about dinner, though there might be 
bread enough for two, more than if eating were a forsaken 
habit ; but we naturally practised abstinence ; and this 
was never felt to be an offence against hospitality, but 
the most proper and considerate course. The waste 
and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, 
seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital 
vigor stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand 
as well as twenty; and if any ever went away disappointed 
or hungry from my house when they found me at home, 
you may depend upon it that I sympathized with them 
at least. So easy is it, though many housekeepers 
doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the 
place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on 
the dinners j'ou give. For my own part, I was never so 
effectually deterred from frequenting a man's house, by 
any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one 
made about dining me, which I took to be a very polite 
and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. 



VISITORS. 119 

I think I shall jiever revisit those scenes. I should be 
proud to have for the motto of my cabin those Hues of 
Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow 
walnut leaf for a card: — 

"Arrived there, the little house they fill, 
Ne looke for entertainment where none was; 
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will: 
The noblest mind the best contentment has." 

When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth 
Colony, went with a companion on a visit of ceremony 
to Massasoit on foot through the woods, and arrived 
tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well received 
by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. 
When the night arrived, to quote their own words, — 
" He laid us on the Vjed with himself and his wife, they 
at the one end and we at the other, it being onh' a plank, 
laid a foot from the grovmd, and a thin mat upon them. 
Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by 
and upon us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging 
than of our journey." At one o'clock the next day 
Massasoit "brought two fishes that he had shot," about 
thrice as big as a bream; "these being boiled, there were 
at least forty looked for a share in them. The most ate 
of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a day; 
and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken 
our journey fasting." Fearing that they would be light- 
headed for want of food and also sleep, owing to ".the 
savages' barbarous singing (for they used to sing them- 
selves asleep)," and that they might get home while 
they had strength to travel, they departed. As for 
lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, 
though what they found an inconvenience was no doubt 
intended for an honor; but as far as eating was concerned, 
I do not see how the Indians could have done better. 
They had nothing to eat themselves, and they were 
wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place 
of food to their guests; so they drew their belts tighter 
and said nothing about it. Another time when Winslow 
visited them, it being a season of plenty with them, 
there was no deficiency in this respect. 



120 WALDEN. 

As for men, they will hardly fail on.e anywhere. I 
had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any 
other period of my life; I moan that I had some. I 
met several there under more favorable circumstances 
than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me 
upon trivial business. In this respect, my company was 
winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had 
withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, 
into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most 
part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest 
sediment was deposited around me. Besides, there 
were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and un- 
cultivated continents on the other side. 

Who should come to my lodge this morning but a 
true Homeric or Paphlagonian man, — he had so suitable 
and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here, 
— a Canadian, a wood-chopper and post-maker, who 
can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on 
a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard 
of Homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not 
know what to do rainy days," though perhaps he has not 
read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some 
priest who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him 
to read his verse in the testament in his native parish 
far awav; and now I must translate to him, while he 
holds the l^ook, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus, for his sad 
countenance. — "Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a 
young girl?" — 

"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia? 
They say that Menoetius hves yet, son of Actor, 
And Peleus Hves, son of Ji^acus, among the Myrmidons, 
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve." 

He says, "That's good." He has a great bundle of 
white-oak l)ark under his arm for a sick man, gathered 
this Sunday morning. "I suppose there's no harm in 
going after such a thing to-day," says he. To him Homer 
was a great writer, though what his writing was about 
he did not know. A more simple and natural man it 
would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such 
a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have 



VISITORS. 121 

hardly any existence for him. He was about twenty- 
eight years old, and had left Canada and his father's 
house a dozen years before to work in the States, and 
earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhajDS in his 
native countr}-. He was cast in the coarsest mould; 
a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with 
a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy 
blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expres- 
sion. He wore a fiat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool- 
colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He was a great 
consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his 
work a couple of miles past my house, — for he chopped 
all summer, — in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold wood- 
chucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a 
string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a 
drink. He came along early, crossing my beanfield, 
though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such 
as Yankees exhibit. He wasn't a-going to hurt him- 
self. He didn't care if he only earned his board. Fre- 
quently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when 
his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go 
back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar 
of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first 
for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond 
safely till nightfall, — loving to dwell long upon these 
themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning: 
" How thick the pigeons are ! If working every day were 
not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want 
by hunting, — pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges, — 
by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week in one 

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes 
and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and 
close to the ground that the sprouts which came up 
afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might 
slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving "a whole 
tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away 
to a slender stake or splinter which you could break 
off with your hand at last. 

He interested me because he was so quiet and soli- 
tary and so happy withal: a well of good humor and 



122 WALDEN. 

contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth 
was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work 
in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with 
a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation 
in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. 
When I approached him he would suspend his work, 
txnd with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of 
a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner 
bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed 
and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had 
he that he sometimes tuml^led down and rolled on the 
ground with laughter at anything which made him think 
and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he 
would exclaim, — ''By George! I can enjoy myself well 
enough here chopping; I want no better sport." Some- 
times, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the 
woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself 
at regular intervals as he walked. In the winter he had 
a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle; 
and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees 
would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and 
peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he 
" liked to have the little fellers about him." 

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In 
physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to 
the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not 
sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he 
answered with a sincere and serious look, " Gorrappit, 
I n^ver was tired in my life." But the intellectual ancl 
what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as 
in an infant. He had been instructed only in that inno- 
cent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests 
teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated 
to the degree of consciousness, but only to tlie degree 
of trust, and reverence, and a child is not made a man, 
but kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave 
him a strong ])ody and contentment for his portion, and 
propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, 
that he might live out his threescore years and ten a 
child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no 
introduction would serve to introduce him, more than 



VISITORS. 123 

if 3'ou introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He 
had got to find him out as you did. He would not play 
any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped 
to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions 
with them. He was so simply and naturally humble — 
if he can be called humble who never aspires — that 
humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he 
coHceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If 
you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if 
he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing 
of himself, but take all responsibility ou itself, and let 
him be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of 
praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and the 
preacher. Their performances were miracles. When 
I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a 
long time that it was merely the handwriting which I 
meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand him- 
self. I sometimes found the name of his native parish 
handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with 
the proper French accent, and knew that he had passed. 
I asked him if he ever wished to write his thoughts. He 
said that he had read and written letters for those who 
could not, but he never tried to write thoughts, — no, he 
could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would 
kill him, and then there was spelling to be attended to 
at the same time! 

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer 
asked him if he did not want the world to be changed; 
but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Cana- 
dian accent, not knowing that the question had ever 
been entertained before, ''No, I like it well enough." 
It would have suggested many things to a philosopher 
to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared 
to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes 
saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I 
did not know whether he was as wise as Shakspeare 
or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him 
of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A towns- 
man told me that when he met him sauntering through 
the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling 
to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise. 



124 walden: 

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, 
in which last he was considerably expert. The former 
was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to 
contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it 
does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him 
on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed 
to look at them in the most simple and practical light. 
He had never heard of such things before. Could he 
do without factories? I asked. He had worn the home- 
made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could 
he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this countiy afford 
any beverage besides water? He had soaked hemlock 
leaves in water and drunk it, and thought that was better 
than water in warm weather. When I asked him if he 
could do without money, he showed the convenience of 
money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the 
most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institu- 
tion, and the very derivation of the word -pecunia. If 
an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles 
and thread at the store, he thought it would be incon- 
venient, and impossible soon, to go on mortgaging some 
portion of the creature each time to that amount. 
He could defend many institutions better than any 
philosopher, because, in describing them as they con- 
cerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, 
and speculation had not suggested to him any other. 
At another time, hearing Plato's definition of a man, — 
a biped without feathers — and that one exhibited a 
cock plucked and called it Plato's man, he thought it 
an important difference that the knees bent the wrong 
way. He would sometimes exclaim: "How I love to 
talk! By George, I could talk all day!" I asked him 
once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he 
had got a new idea this summer. '^Good Lord," said 
he, "a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget 
the ideas he has had, he will do well. Maybe the man 
you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, 3^our 
mind must be there; you think of weeds." He would 
sometimes ask mo first, on such occasions, if I had made 
any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he 
was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest 



VISITORS. 125 

a substitute within him for the priest without, and some 
higher motive for hving. '' Satisfied !"' said he; ''some 
men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. 
One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied 
to sit all day with his back to the fire and his l^elly to the 
table, by George!" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, 
could get him to take the spiritvial view of things; the 
highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple 
expediency, such as you might expect an animal to 
appreciate; and this, practicall}-, is true of most men. 
If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he 
merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it 
was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty 
and the like virtues. 

There was a certain positive originality, however 
slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed 
that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own 
opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day 
walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the 
reorigination of many of the institutions of society. 
Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express him- 
self distinctly, he always had a presentable thought be- 
ximd. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed 
in his animal life, that, though more promising than a 
merety learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything 
which can be reported. He suggested that there might 
be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however 
permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own 
view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as 
bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, 
though they may be dark and muddy. 

Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and 
the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, 
asked for a glass of water. I told them that I drank 
at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them 
a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from 
that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about 
the first of April, when everybody is on the move; and I 
had my share of good luck, though there were some curious 
specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men from 



126 WALDEN. 

the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I 
endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, 
and make their confessions to me; in such cases making 
wit the theme of our conversation; and so was com- 
pensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser 
than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen 
of the town, and thought it was time that the tables 
were turned. With respect to wit, I learned that there 
was not much difference between the half and the whole. 
One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simple-minded 
pauper, whom with others I had often seen used as 
fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields 
to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, 
and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told me, with 
the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather 
inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was 
"deficient in intellect." These were his words. The 
Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared 
as much for him as for another, "I have always been 
so," said he, ''from my childhood; I never had much 
mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the 
head. It was the Lord's will, I suppose." And there 
he was to prove the truth of his words. He was a meta- 
physical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellow-man 
on such promising ground, — it was so simple and sincere 
and so true, all that he said. And, true enough, in pro- 
portion as he appeared to humble himself was he exalted. 
I did not know at first but it was the result of a wise 
policy. It seemed that from such a basis of truth and 
frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, 
our mtercourse might go forward to something better 
than the intercourse of sages. 

I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly 
among the town's poor, but who should be; who are 
among the world's poor, at any rate, guests who appeal 
not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who 
earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal 
with the information that they are resolved, for one 
thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor 
that he be not actually starving, though he may have 
the very best appetite in the' world, however he got it. 



VISITORS. 127 

Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not 
know when their visit had terminated, though I went 
about my business again, answering them from greater 
and greater remoteness. Men of ahnost every degree 
of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who 
had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway 
slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time 
to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the 
hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me Ijc- 
scechingly, as much as to say, — 

" O Christian, will you send me back? " 

One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped 
to forward toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a 
hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thou- 
sand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which arc 
made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pur- 
suit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's 
dew, — and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; 
men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centi- 
pede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed 
a book in which visitors should write their names, as at 
the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a 
memory to make that necessary. 

I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of 
my visitors. Girls and boys and young women gen- 
erally seemed glad to be in the woods. They looked 
in the pond and at the flowers, and improved their time. 
Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude 
and employment, and of the great distance at which I 
dwelt from something or other; and though they saicl 
that they loved a ramble in the woods occasionally, it 
was obvious that they did not. Restless committed 
men, whose time was all taken up in getting a living 
or keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they 
enjoyed a monopoly of the subject, who covild not bear 
all kinds of opinions; doctors, lawyers, uneasy house- 
keepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I 

was out, — how came Mrs. to know that my sheets 

were not as clean as hers? — young men who had ceased 
to be young, and had concluded that it was safest to 



128 WALDEN. 

follow the beaten track of the professions, — all these 
generally said that it was not possible to do so much 
good in my position. Ay! there was the rub. The old 
and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought 
most of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to 
them life seemed full of danger, — what danger is there 
if you don't think of any? — and they thought that a 
prudent man would carefully select the safest position, 
where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment's warning. 
To them the village was literally a co7n-munity, a league 
for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they 
would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. 
The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always 
danger that he may die, though the danger must be 
allowed to be less in joroportion as he is dead-and-alive 
to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs. 
Finally, there were the self-stjded reformers, the greatest 
bores of all, who thought that I was forever singing, — 

This is the house that I built; 

This is the man that hves in the house that I built; 

but they did not know that the third line was, — 

These are the folks that worry the man 
That lives in the house that I built. 

T did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; 
but I feared the men-harriers rather. 

I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children 
come a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning 
walk in clean shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and 
philosophers, in short, all honest pilgrims, who came 
out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really left the 
village behind, I was ready to greet with, — ''Welcome, 
Englishmen! welcome. Englishmen!" for I had had 
communication with that race. 



THE BE AX FIELD. 129 

VII. 

THE BEANFIELD. 

Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, 
added together, was seven miles already planted, were 
impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown con- 
siderably before the latest were in the ground; indeed, 
they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning 
of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean 
labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, 
though so many more than I wanted. They attached me 
to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus. But 
why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This 
was my curious labor all summer, — to make this por- 
tion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only 
cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, 
sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead 
this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? 
I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye 
to them; and this is my day's work. It is a fine broad 
leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains 
which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the 
soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. 
My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all wood- 
chucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an 
acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort 
and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? 
Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough 
for them, and go forward to meet new foes. 

When I was four years old, as I well remember, I 
was brought from Boston to this my native town, through 
these very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one 
of the oldest scenes stamped on my memory. And now 
to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very 
water. The pines still stand here older than I; or, if 
some have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their 
stumps, and a new growth is rising all around, preparing 
another aspect for new infant eyes. Almost the same 



130 WALDEN. 

jolinswort springs from the same perennial root in this 
pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe 
that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one 
of the results of my presence and influence is seen in 
these bean leaves, corn blades, and potato vines. 

I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and 
as it was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, 
and I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, 
I did not give it any manure; but in the course of the 
summer it appeared by the arrow-heads which I turned 
up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt 
here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to 
clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted 
the soil for this very crop. 

Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across 
the road, or the sun had got above the shrulj-oaks, while 
all the dew was on, though the farmers warned me 
against it, — I would advise you to do all your work 
if possible while the dew is on, — I began to level the 
ranks of haughty weeds in my beanfield and throw dust 
upon their heads. Early in the morning I worked 
barefooted, dabbling like a plastic artist in the dewy 
and crumbling sand, but later in the day the sun blistered 
my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe beans, pacing 
slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly 
upland, between the long green row3, fifteen rods, the 
one end terminating in a shrub-oak copse where I could 
rest in the shade, the other in a blackberry field where 
the green berries deepened their tints by the time I had 
made another bout. Removing the weeds, putting 
fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this 
weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express 
its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather 
than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making 
the earth say beans instead of grass, — this was my daily 
work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired 
men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, 
I was much slower, and became much more intimate 
with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, 
even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps 
never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and 



THE BE AX FIELD. 131 

imperishable moral, antl to the scholar it yields a classic 
result. A very agricula laboriosus was I to travellers 
bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to no- 
body knows where; they sitting at their ease in gigs, 
with elbows on knees, and reins loosely hanging in 
festoons; I the homestaying laborious native of the soil. 
But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought. 
It was the only open and cultivated field for a great 
distance on either side of the road; so they made the 
most of it; and sometimes the man in the field heard 
more of travellers' gossip and comment than was meant 
for his ear: "Beans so late! peas so late!" — for I con- 
tinued to plant when others had begun to hoe, — the 
ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn, 
my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder." "Does he live 
there?" asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and 
the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful clobbin 
to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure 
in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any 
little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. " But 
here were two acres and a half of furrows, and only a 
hoe for cart and two hands to draw it, — there being an 
aversion to other carts and horses, — and chip dirt far 
away. Fellow-travellers as they rattled by compared 
it aloud with the fields which they had passed, so that I 
came to know how I stood in the agricultural world. 
This was one field not in Mr. Coleman's report. And, 
by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which 
Nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by 
man? The crop of English hay is carefulty weighed, the 
moisture calculated, the silicates and the potash; but 
in all dells and pond holes in the woods and pastures 
and swamps grows a rich and various crop only unreaped 
b}^ man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link 
between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are 
civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or 
barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, 
a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully 
returning to their wild and primitive state that I culti- 
vated, and my hoe played the Rfuis des Vaches for them. 
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, 



132 WALDEN. 

sings the brown-thrashcr — or red mavis, as some love 
to call him — all the morning, glad of your society, that 
would find out another farmer's field if yours were not 
here. While you are planting the seed, he cries, — " Drop 
it, drop it, — cover it up, cover it up, — pull it up, pull it up, 
pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was safe 
from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his 
rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one 
string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and 
yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap 
sort of top dressing in which I had entire faith. 

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my 
hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who 
in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their 
small implements of war and hunting were brought to 
the light of this modern day. They lay mingled with 
other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of 
having been burned by Indian fires, and some l^y the sun, 
and also bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the 
recent cultivators of the soil. When my hoe tinkled 
against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and 
the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which 
yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no 
longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I 
remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered 
at all, my acc^uaintances who had gone to the city to 
attend the oratorios. The night-hawk circled over- 
head in the sunny afternoons — for I sometimes made a 
day of it — like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, 
falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if 
the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, 
and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill 
the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or 
rocks on the tops of hills, where few have found them; 
graceful and slender, like ripples caught up from the 
pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the 
heavens; such kindredship is in Nature. The hawk is 
aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, 
those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the 
elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes 
I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, 



THE BE AN FIELD. 133 

alternately soaring and descending, approaching and 
leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of 
my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage 
of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight 
quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from 
under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish, 
portentous, and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace 
of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When 
I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights 
I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the 
inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers. 

On gala days the town fires its great guns, which 
echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of 
martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To 
me, away there in my beanfield at the other end of the 
town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst; 
and when there was a military turnout of which I was 
ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the clay 
of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon as if 
some eruption would break out there soon, either scarla- 
tina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable 
puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the 
Waylancl road, brought me information of the "trainers." 
It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had 
swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil's 
advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous 
of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call 
them down into the hive again. And when the sound 
died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most 
favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had 
got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex 
hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey 
with which it was smeared. 

I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachu- 
setts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; 
and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with 
an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor 
cheerfully with a calm trust in the future. 

When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded 
as if the village was a vast bellows, and all the buildings 
expanded and collapsed alternately with a din. But 



134 WALDEN. 

sometimes it was a really noble and inspiring strain that 
reached these woods, and the trumpet that sings of fame, 
and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a good relish, 
— for why should we always stand for trifles? — and 
looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise 
my chivalry upon. These martial strains seemed as 
far away as Palestine, and reminded me of a march of 
crusaders in the horizon, with a slight tantivy and tremu- 
lous motion of the elm-tree tops which overhang the 
village. This was one of the great days; though the sky 
had from my clearing only the same everlastingly great 
look that it wears daily, and I saw no difference in it. 

It was a singular experience, that long acquaintance 
which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and 
hoeing, and harvesting, and thrashing, and picking 
over, and selling them, — the last was the hardest of 
all, — I might add eating, for I did taste. I was deter- 
mined to know beans. When they were growing, I 
used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, 
and commonly spent the rest of the day about other 
affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance 
one makes with various kinds of weeds, — it will bear 
some iteration in the account, for there was no little 
iteration in the labor, — disturbing their delicate organ- 
izations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious dis- 
tinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, 
and sedulously cultivating another. That's Roman 
wormwood, — that's pigweed, — that's sorrel, — that's piper- 
grass, — have at him, chop him up, turn his roots up- 
ward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, 
if you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green 
as a leek in two days. A long war, not with cranes, but 
with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and 
dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to 
their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their 
enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many 
a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot 
above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and 
rolled in the dust. 

Those summer days which some of mv contemporaries 
devoted to the fine arts in Boston and Rome, and others 



THE BE AN FIELD. 135 

to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London 
or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New 
England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted 
beans to eat. for I am by natiu'e a Pythagorean, so far 
as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or 
voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, 
as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes 
and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It 
was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued 
too long, might have become a dissipation. Though I 
gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, 
I hoed them unusually well as far as I went, and was paid 
for it in the end, "there being in truth," as Evelyn says, 
"no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this 
continual motion, repastination, and turning of the 
mould with the spade." "The earth," he adds else- 
where, "especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism 
in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue 
(call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all 
the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all 
dungings and other sordid tempering.*? being . but the 
vicars succeclaneous to this improvement." Moreover, 
this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay 
fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as 
Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" 
from the air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans. 

But to be more particular, for it is complained that 
Mr. Coleman has reported chiefly the expensive experi- 
ments of gentlemen farmers, my outgoes were, — 

For a hoe $0 54 

Ploughing, harrowing, and furrowing 7 50 Too much. 

Beans for seed 3 12^ 

Potatoes " 1 33 

Peas for seed 40 

Turnip seed 06 

White hne for crow fence 02 

Horse cultivator and boy three hours 1 00 

Horse and cart to get crop 75 

In all $14 72^ 

M}^ income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem 
esse oportet) , from 



136 WALDEN. 

Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold $16 94 

Five bushels large potatoes 2 50 

Nine bushels small potatoes 2 25 

Grass 1 00 

Stalks 75 



In all $23 44 

Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of $8 71^. 

This is the result of my experience in raising beans. 
Plant the common small white bush bean about the first 
of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, 
being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. 
First look out for worms, and supply vacancies, by plant- 
ing anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an 
exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender 
leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the 
young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice 
of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young 
pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all, harvest 
as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have 
a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by 
this means. 

This further experience also I gained, I said to my- 
self, I will not plant beans and corn with so much in- 
dustry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not 
lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and 
the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even 
with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely 
it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said 
this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and 
another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, 
Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they 
were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had 
lost their vitality and so did not come up. Commonly 
men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or 
timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and 
beans each new year precisely as the Indians did cen- 
turies ago, and taught the first settlers to do, as if there 
were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to 
my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the 
seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down 



I 



THE BE AN FIELD. 137 

in! But wh}- should not the New Englander try new 
adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his 
potato and grass crop, and his orchards, — raise other 
crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about 
our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about 
a new generation of men? We should really be fed and 
cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that 
some of the qualities which I have named, which we all 
prize more than those other productions, but which are 
for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had 
taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a subtile 
and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice, 
though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along 
the road. Our ambassadors should be instructed to 
send home such seeds as these, and Congress help to 
distribute them over all the land. We should never 
stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never 
cheat and insult and banish one another by our mean- 
ness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friend- 
liness. We should not meet thus in haste. i\Iost men 
I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; 
they are busy about their beans. We would not deal 
with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a 
spade as a staff between his work, not as a mushroom, 
l)ut partially risen out of the earth, something more 
than erect, like swallows alighted and walking on the 
ground : — 

"And as he spake, his wings would now and then 
Spread, as he naeant to fly, then close again," 

so that we should suspect that we might be conversing 
with an angel. Bread may not always nourish us; but 
it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of 
our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we 
knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in 
man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. 

Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that 
husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with 
irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object 
being to have large farms and large crops merely. We 
have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not 



138 WALDEN. 

excepting our Cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, 
by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness 
of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It 
is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He 
sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to 
the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, 
and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of 
regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring 
property chiefl}^, the landscape is deformed, husbandry 
is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest 
of lives. He knows Nature but as a robl:)er. Cato saj's 
that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or 
just {maximeque pius quoestus), and according to Varro, 
the old Romans " callecl the same earth Mother and Ceres, 
and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and 
useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of 
King Saturn." 

We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cul- 
tivated fields and on the prairies and forests without 
distinction. They all reflect and absorb his rays ahke, 
and the former make but a small part of the glorious 
picture which he beholds in his daily course. In his 
view the earth is all et^ually cultivated like a garden. 
Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and 
heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. 
What though I value the seed of these beans, and harvest 
that in the fall of the year? This broad field which I 
have looked at so long looks not to me as the principal 
cultivator, but away from me to influences more genial 
to it, which water and make it green. These beans 
have results which are not harvested by me. Do they 
not grow for woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat (in 
Latin spica, obsolete^ speca, from spe, hope) should not 
be the only hope of the husbandman; its kernel or grain 
igranum, from gerendo, bearing) is not all that it bears. 
How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I not rejoice also 
at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary 
of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether 
the fields fill the farmer's barns. The true husbandman 
will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no 
concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this j'ear 



THE VILLAGE. 139 

or not, and finish his labor with every day, rehnquishing 
all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in 
his mind not only his first but his last fruits also. 



VIII. 

THE VILLAGE. 

After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in 
the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swim- 
ming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the 
dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last 
wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon 
was absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the 
village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly 
going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, 
on from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in 
homoeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way 
as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs. As I 
walked in the woods to. see the birds and squirrels, so 
I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead 
of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. 
In one direction from my house there was a colony of 
muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms 
and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of 
busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie 
dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running 
over to a neighbor's to gossip. I went there frequently 
to observe their habits. The village appeared to me a 
great news room; and on one side to support it, as once 
at Redding & Company's on State Street, they kept nuts 
and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. Some 
have such a vast appetite for the former commodit}^, that 
is, the news, and such sound digestive organs, that they 
can sit forever in public avenues without stirring, and 
let it simmer and whisper through them like the Etesian 
winds, or as if inhaling ether, it only producing numbness 
and insensibility to pain, — otherwise it would be often 
painful to hear, — without affecting the consciousness. 
I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the village. 



140 WALDEX. 

to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder 
sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward 
and their eyes glancing along the line this way and that, 
from time to time, with a voluptuous expression, or else 
leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets, 
like caryatides, as if to prop it up. They, being commonly 
out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind. These 
are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely 
digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and 
more delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the 
vitals of the village were the grocery, the bar-room, the 
post-office, and the bank; and, as a necessary part of 
the machinery, they kept a bell, a big gun, and a fire- 
engine, at convenient places; and the houses were so 
arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and 
fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run 
the gantlet, and every man, woman, and child might 
get a lick at him. Of course, those who were stationed 
nearest to the head of the line, where they could most 
see and be seen, and have the first blow at him, paid 
the highest prices for their places ; and the few straggling 
inhabitants in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line 
began to occur, and the traveller could get over walls 
or turn aside into cow paths, and so escape, paid a very 
slight ground or window tax. Signs were hung out on all 
sides to allure him; some to catch him by the appetite, 
as the tavern and victualling cellar; some by the fanc}^, 
as the dry goods store and the jeweller's; and others 
by the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the 
shoemaker, or the tailor. Besides, there was a still 
more terrible standing invitation to call at every one 
of these houses, and company expected about these times. 
For the most part I escaped wonderfully from these 
dangers , either by proceeding at once boldly and without 
deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who 
run the gantlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high 
things, like Orpheus, who, ''loudly singing the praises 
of the gods to his lyre, drowned the voices of the Sirens, 
and kept out of danger." Sometimes I bolted suddenly, 
and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not 
stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at 



THE VILLAGE. 141 

a gap in the fence I was even accustomed to make an 
irruption into some houses, where I was well entertained, 
and after learning the kernels and very last sieve-ful of 
news, what had subsided, the prospects of war and peace, 
and whether the world was likely to hold together much 
longer, I was let out through the rear avenues, and so 
escaped to the woods again. 

It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to 
launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark 
and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village 
parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal 
upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, 
having made all tight without and withdrawn under 
hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my 
outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when 
it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by 
the cabin fire "as I sailed." I was never cast away nor 
distressed in any weather, though I encountered some 
severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in com- 
mon nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to 
look up at the opening iDetween the trees above the path 
in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart- 
path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had 
worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees 
which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines 
for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the 
midst of the woods, invariably in the darkest night. 
Sometimes, after coming home thus late in a dark and 
muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my eyes 
could not see, dreaming and absent-minded all the way, 
until I was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift 
the latch, I have not been able to recall a single step of 
my walk, and I have thought that perhaps my body 
would find its way home if its master should forsake it, 
as the hand finds its way to the mouth without assistance. 
Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into even- 
ing, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct 
him to the cart-path in the rear of the house, and then 
point out to him the direction he was to pursue, and in 
keeping which he was to be guided rather by his feet than 
his eyes. One very dark night I directed thus on their 



142 WALDEN. 

way two young men who had been fishing in the pond. 
They lived about a mile off through the woods, and 
were quite used to the route. A day or two after one 
of them told me that they wandered about the greater 
part of the night, close by their own premises, and did 
not get home till toward morning, by which time, as 
there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, 
and the leaves were very wet, they were drenched to 
their skins. I have heard of many going astray even in 
the village streets, when the darkness was so thick that 
you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is. Some 
who live in the outskirts, having come to town a-shopping 
in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the night, 
and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half 
a mile out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with 
their feet, and not knowing when they turned. It is 
a surprising and memorable, as well as valual)le ex- 
perience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in 
a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a 
well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which 
way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has 
travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a 
feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a 
road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity 
is infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are 
constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots 
by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if 
we go beyond our usual covirse we still carry in our minds 
the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we 
are completely lost, or turned round, — for a man needs 
only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this 
world to be lost, — do we appreciate the vastness and 
strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the 
points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether 
from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in 
other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin 
to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the in- 
finite extent of our relations. 

One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, 
when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cob- 
bler's, I was seized and put into jail, because, as I have 



THE VILLAGE. 143 

elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize 
the authority of, the state, which buys and sells men, 
women, and chikh'en, like cattle at the door of its senate- 
house. I had gone down to the woods for other pur- 
poses. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and 
paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, 
constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow 
society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with 
more or less effect, might have run "amok" against 
society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" 
against me, it being the desperate party. However, 
I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, 
and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner 
of huckleberries on Fair-Haven Hill. I was never 
molested Ijy any person but those who represented the 
state. I had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which 
held my papers, not even a nail to put over my latch or 
windows. I never fastened my door night or day, 
though I was to be absent several days; not even when 
the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. 
And yet my house was more respected than if it had been 
surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler 
could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary 
amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the 
curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left 
of my dinner, and what prospect I had of a supper. 
Yet, though many people of every class came this way 
to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from 
these sources, and I never missed anything but one small 
book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly 
gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found 
by this time. I am convinced that if all men were to 
live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would 
be unknown. These take place only in communities 
where some have got more than is sufficient while others 
have not enough. The Pope's Homers would soon get 
properly distributed. — 

" Nee bella fuerunt, 
Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes," 

" Nor wars did men molest, 
When only beechen bowls were in request." 



144 WALDEN. 

" You who govern public affairs, what need have you 
to employ punishments? Love virtue, and the people 
will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are 
like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the 
grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends." 



IX. 

THE PONDS. 

Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society 
and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled 
still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet 
more unfrequented parts of the town, ''to fresh woods ^ 
and pastures new," or, while the sun was setting, made 
my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair- 
Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The 
fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of 
them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There 
is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If 
you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the 
cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose 
that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked 
them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have 
not been known there since they grew on her three hills. 
The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with 
the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and 
they become mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice 
reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported 
thither from the country's hills. 

Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, 
I joined some impatient companion who had been fish- 
ing on the pond since morning, as silent and motionless 
as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after practising various 
kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the 
time I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect of 
Coenobites. There was one older man, an excellent 
fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased 
to look upon my house as a building erected for the con- 
venience of fishermen; and I was equally pleased when 



THE PONDS. 145 

he sat in my doorway to arrange his Hnes. Once in a 
while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of the 
boat, and I at the other; but not many words passed 
between us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but 
he occasionally hummed a psalm, which harmonized well 
enough with my philosophy. Our intercourse was thus 
altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing 
to remember than if it had been carried on by speech. 
When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune 
with, I used to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle 
on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods 
•with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up as the 
keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited a 
growl from every wooded vale and hill side. 

In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat play- 
ing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have 
charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling 
over the ribbed bottom, which w^as strewed with the 
wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond 
adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, 
with a companion, and making a fire close to the water's 
edge, which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught 
pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and 
when we had done, far in the night, threw the burning 
brands high into the air like sky-rockets, which, coming 
down into the pond, were quenched wnth a loud hissing, 
and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through 
this, whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of 
men again. But now I had made my home by the shore. 

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the 
family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, 
and, partly with a view to the next daj-'s dinner, spent 
the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, 
serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to 
time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at 
hand. These experiences were very memorable and 
valuable to me, — anchored in forty feet of water, and 
twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded some- 
times by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling 
the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and com- 
municating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal 



146 WALDEiY. 

fishes which had their clweUing forty feet below, or some- 
times dragging sixty feet of Hue about the pond as I 
<h"ifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling 
a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling 
about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering pur- 
pose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length 
you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned 
pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It 
was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your 
thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes 
in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to 
interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. 
It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into 
into the air, as well as downward into this element which 
was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as 
it were with one hook. 

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, 
though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, 
nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented 
it, or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable 
for its depth and purity as to merit a particular descrip- 
tion. It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long 
and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and 
contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial 
spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any 
visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evapora- 
tion. The surroiuiding hills rise abruptly from the water 
to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the south- 
east and east they attain to about one hundred and one 
hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a c^uarter and 
a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. 
All our Concord waters have two colors at least, one 
when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, 
close at hand. The first depends more on the light, and 
follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they 
appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, 
and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy 
weather tliey are sometimes of a dark slate color. The 
sea, however, is said to be blue one day and green another 
without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I 
have seen our river, when, the landscape being covered 



THE PONDS. 147 

with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as 

grass. Some consider blue "to be the color of pure water, 

whether liquid or solid." But, looking directl}^ down 

into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very 

different colors. Walden is blue at one time and green 

at another, even from the same point of view. Lying 

between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the 

color of both. Viewed from a hill top it reflects the color 

of the sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next 

the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, 

which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the 

body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a 

hill top, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have 

referred this to the reflection of the verdure; but it is 

equally green there against the railroad sand-bank, and 

in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it 

may be simply the result of the prevailing blue mixed 

with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its 

iris. This is that portion, also, where in the spring, 

the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from 

the bottom, and also transmitted through the earth, 

melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still 

frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much 

agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the 

waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because 

there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little 

distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such 

a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided 

vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a 

matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered 

or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more 

cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original 

dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which 

last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous 

greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of 

the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west 

before sundown. Yet a single glass of its water held 

up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of 

air. It is well-known that a large plate of glass will 

have a green tmt, owing, as the makers say, to its "body," 

but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How 



14S V.'ALDEX. 

large a body of Walden water would be required to re- 
flect a green tint I have never proved. The water of 
our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking 
directly down on it, and like that of most ponds, imparts 
to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge; but 
this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of 
the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more 

' unnatural, which, as the Hmbs are magnified and dis- 
torted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit 
studies for a Michael Angelo. 

The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily 
be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. 
Paddling over it, you may see many feet beneath the 
surface the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only 
an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by 
their transverse bars, and you think that they must be 
ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once, in the 
winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes 
through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped 
ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if 
some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods 
directly into one of the holes, where the water was 
twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down 
on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the 
axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with . its 
helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse 
of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and 
swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, 
if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly 

lOver it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down 
the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood 
with my knife, I made a slip-noose, wdiich I attached to 
its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the 
knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, 
and so pulled the axe out again. 

The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded 
white stones like paving stones, excepting one or two 
short sand beaches, and is so steep that in many places 
a single leap will carry you into water over your head; 
and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that 
would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose 



THE PONDS. 149 

on the opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It 
IS nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would say 
that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable 
plants, except in the little meadows recently overflowed, 
which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny 
does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, 
yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and 
potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or two; 
all which however a bather might not perceive; and 
these plants are clean and bright like the element they 
glow m. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, 
and then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest 
parts, where there is usually a little sediment, probably 
from the decay of the leaves, which have been wafted 
on to it so many successive falls, and a bright green 
weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter. 

We have one other pond just like this. White Pond 
in Nme Acre Corner, about two and a half miles wes- 
terly, but, though I am acquainted with most of the 
ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know 
a thu'd of this pure and well-like character. Successive 
nations perchance have drunk at, admired, and fathomed 
it, and passed away , and still its water is green and pellu- 
cid as ever. Not an intermitting s]3ring! Perhaps on 
that spring morning when Adam and Eve w^ere driven 
out of Eden Walden Pond w^as already in existence, and 
even then breakmg up in a gentle spring rain accompanied 
with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads 
of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, 
when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it 
had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its 
waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and 
obtained a patent of heaven to be the only Walden Pond 
in the world and chstiller of celestial dews. Who knows 
m how many un remembered nations' literatures this 
has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs 
presided over it in the Golden Age*? It is a gem of the 
first "water which Concord wears in her coronet. 

Yet perchance the first who came to this well have 
left some trace of their footsteps. I have been sur- 
prised to detect encirclmg the pond, even where a thick 



150 WALDEX. 

wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow 
shelf dike path in the steep hill side, alternately rising and 
falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, 
as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet 
of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time un- 
wittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land. 
This is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle 
of the pond in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, 
appearing as a clear undulating white line, unobscured 
by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a mile 
off in many places where in summer it is hardly dis- 
tinguishable close at hand. The snow reprints it, as 
it were, in clear white type alto-relievo. The ornamented 
grounds of villas Avhich will one day be built here may 
still preserve some trace of this. 

The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, 
and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, 
man}^ pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the 
winter and lower in the summer, though not correspond- 
ing to the general wet and dryness. I can remember 
when it was a fo"ot or two lower, and also when it was at 
least five feet higher, than when I lived by it. , There 
is a narrow sand-bar running into it, very deep water 
on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder, 
some six i^ods from the main shore, about the year 1824, 
w^hich it has not been possible to do for twenty-five 
years; and on the other hand, my friends used to listen 
with incredulity when I told them that a few j'ears later 
I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove 
in the woods, fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, 
which place was long since converted into a meadow. 
But the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now, 
in the summer of '52, is just five feet higher than when 
I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and 
fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a 
difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; 
and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is in- 
significant in amount, and this overflow must be referred 
to causes which affect the deep springs. This same sum- 
mer the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable 
that this fluctua'tion, whether periodical or not, appears 



THE PONDS. \151 

thus to require many years for its accomplishment. IN 
have observed one rise and a part of two falls, and I 
expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence the water will 
again be as low as I have ever known it. Flint's Pond, 
a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned 
by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate 
ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently at- 
tained their greatest height at the same time with the 
latter. The same is true, as far as my observation goes, 
of White Pond. 

This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this 
use at least: the water standing at this great height for a 
year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, 
kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its 
edge since the last I'ise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens, 
and others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed 
shore; for, unlike many ponds, and all waters w^hich are 
subject to a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water 
is lowest. On the side of the pond next my house, a row 
of pitch-pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped 
over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroach- 
ments; and their size indicates how many years have 
elapsed since the last rise to this height. By this fluctua- 
tion the pond asserts its title to a shore, arid thus the shore 
is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. 
These are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. It 
licks its chaps from time to time. When the water is at 
its height, the alders, willows, and maples send forth a 
mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from all sides of 
their stems in the water, and to the height of three or four 
feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; 
and I have known the high blueberry bushes about the 
shore, which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abun- 
dant crop under these circumstances. 

Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so 
regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradi- 
tion, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their 
youth, that anciently the Indians were holding a pow- 
wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens 
as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used 
much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one 



152) WALDEN. 

of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were 
thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only 
one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the 
pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the 
hill shook these stones rolled down its side and became the 
present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once 
there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this In- 
dian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account 
of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who re- 
members so well when he first came here with his divining- 
rod,, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel 
pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a 
well here. As for the stones, many still think that they 
are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the waves 
on these hills ; but I observe that the surrounding hills are 
remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they 
have been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of 
the railroad cut nearest the pond ; and, moi'cover, there are 
most stones where the shore is most abrupt; so that, un- 
fortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me. I detect 
the paver. If the name was not derived from that of 
some English locality, — Saffron Walden, for instance, — 
one might suppose that it was called, originally, Walled-in 
Pond. 

The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in 
the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times ; and I 
think that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the 
town. In the winter, all water which is expovsed to the air 
is colder than springs and wells which arc protected from 
it. The temperature of the pond water which had stood 
in the room where I sat from five o'clock in the afternoon 
till noon the next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the ther- 
mometer having been up to 65° or 70° some of the time, 
owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42°, or one de- 
gree colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the 
village just drawn. The temperature of the Boiling Spring 
the same day was 45°, or the wannest of any water tried, 
though it is the coldest that I know of in summer, when, 
besides, shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled 
with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so 
warm as most water which is exposed to the sun, on ac- 



THE PONDS. 153 

count of its depth. In the wannest weather I usually 
placed a pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the 
night, and remained so during the day; though I also re- 
sorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as good 
when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no 
taste of the pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer 
b}' the shore of a pond, needs onty bury a pail of water a 
few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be independent of 
the luxury of ice. 

There have been caught in Walden, pickerel, one weigh- 
ing seven pounds, to say nothing of another which carried 
off a reel with great velocity, which the fisherman safely 
set down at eight pounds because he did not see him, perch 
and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners, 
and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, 
shiners, chivins or roach (Leucisus pulchellus) , a very few 
breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds, — 
I am thus particular because the weight of a fish is com- 
monly its only title to fame, and these are the only eels I 
have heard of here; — also, I have a faint recollection of a 
little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a 
greenish back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which 
I mention here chiefly to link my facts to fable. Neverthe- 
less, this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel, 
though not abundant, are its chief boast. I have seen at 
one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different 
kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like 
those caught in the river; a bright golden kind, with 
greenish reflections and remarkably deep, which is the 
most common here; and another, golden-colored, and 
shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides with small 
dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint 
blood-red ones very much like a trout. The specific name 
reticulatus would not apply to this; it should be guttatus 
rather. These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than 
their size promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch, also, 
and indeed all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much 
cleaner, handsomer, and firmer fleshed than those in the 
river and most other ponds, as the water is purer, and they 
can easily be distinguished from them. Probably many 
ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of them. 



154 WALDEN. 

There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a 
few mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their traces 
about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. 
Sometimes, when I pushed off my boat in the morning, I 
disturbed a great mud-turtle which had secreted himself 
under the boat in the night. Ducks and geese frequent it 
in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows {Hirundo 
hicolor) skim over it, and the pectwcets (Totanus macu- 
larius) " teter " along its stony shores all summer. I have 
sometimes cjisturbed a fishhawk sitting on a white-pine 
over the water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the 
wing of a gull, like Fair-Haven. At most, it tolerates one 
annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence 
which frequent it now. 

You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the 
sandy eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet 
deep, and also in some other parts of the pond, some cir- 
cular heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot in 
height, consisting of small stones less than a hen's egg in 
size, where all around is bare sand." At first you wonder if 
the Indians could have formed them on the ice for any 
purpose, and so, when the ice molted, they sank to the 
bottom ; but they are too regular and some of them plainly 
too fresh for that. They are similar to those found in 
rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, I 
know not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they 
are the nests of the chivin. These lend a pleasing mystery 
to the bottom. 

The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I 
have in my mind's eye the western indented with deep 
bays, the bolder northern, and the beautifully scalloped 
southern shore, where successive capes overlap each other 
and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest has 
never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as 
when seen from the middle of a small lake amid hills which 
rise from the water's edge; for the water in which it is re- 
flected not only makes the best foreground in such a case, 
but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable 
boundary to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in 
its edge there, as where the axe has cleared a part, or a 
cultivated field abuts on it. The trees have ample room to 



THE PONDS. 155 

expand on the water side, and each sends forth its most 
vigorous branch in that direction. There Nature has 
woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just grada- 
tions from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. 
There are few traces of man's hand to be- seen. The water 
laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. 

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive 
feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder 
measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile 
trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe 
it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhang- 
ing brows. 

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of 
the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight 
haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen 
whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a 
lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread 
of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleam- 
ing against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum 
of the atmosphere from another. You would think that 
3'ou could walk dry under it to the opposite hills, and that 
the swallows which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, 
they sometimes dive below the line, as it were by mistake, 
and are undeceived. As you look over the pond westward 
you are obliged to employ both your hands to defend your 
eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they 
are equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its 
surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except 
where the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over 
its whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the 
finest imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck 
plumes itself, or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as 
to touch it. It may be that in the distance a fish describes 
an arc of three or four feet in the air, and there is one bright 
flash where it emerges, and another where it strikes the 
water; sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here 
and there, perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its sur- 
face, which the fishes dart, at and so dimple it again. It is 
like molten glass cooled but not congealed, and the few 
motes in it are pure and beautiful like the imperfections in 
glass. You may often detect a yet smoother and darker 



156 WALDEN. 

water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cob- 
web, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a 
hill top you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not 
a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth sur- 
face but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the 
whole lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness this 
simple fact is advertised, — this piscine murder will out, — 
and from my distant perch I distinguish the circling un- 
dulations when they are half a dozen rods in diameter. 
You can even detect a water-bug {Gyrinus) ceaselessly 
progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off; 
for they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuovis 
ripple bounded by two diverging lines, but the skaters 
glide over it without rippling it perceptibly. When the 
surface is considerably agitated there are no skaters nor 
water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm days, they leave 
their havens and adventurously glide forth from the shore 
by short impulses till they completely cover it. It is a 
soothing cmplo3aiient, on one of those fine days in the fall 
when all the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit 
on a stump on such a height as this, overlooking the pond, 
and study the dimpling circles which are incessantly in- 
scribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid the reflected 
skies and trees. Over this great expanse there is no dis- 
turbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed aw^ay and 
assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trem- 
bling circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. Not a 
fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus re- 
ported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the 
constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle pulsing of 
its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of joy and 
thrills of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful the 
phenomena of the lake ! Again the works of man shine as 
in the spring. A3', every leaf and twig and stone and cob- 
web sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered with 
dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an 
insect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls, how 
sweet the echo ! 

In such a day in September or October, Waldcn is a per- 
fect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my 
eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at 



THE PONDS. 157 

the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, hes on the sur- 
face of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations 
come and go without defihng it. It is a mirror which no 
stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, 
whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no 
dust, can dim its surface ever fresh; — a mirror in which all 
impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the 
sun's hazy brush, — this the light dust-cloth, — which re- 
tains no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to 
loift as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in 
its bosom still. 

A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is 
continually receiving new life and motion from above.- It 
is intermediate in its nature between land and sk}'. On 
land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is 
rippled b}' the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across 
it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that 
we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look 
down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where 
a still subtler spirit sweeps over it. 

The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the 
latter part of October, when the severe frosts have come; 
and then and in November, usually, in a calm da}^, there 
is absolutely nothing to ripple the surface. One Novem- 
ber afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of 
several days' duration, when the sky was still completely 
overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that the 
pond w^as remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to 
distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the 
bright tints of October, but the sombre November colors 
of the surrounding hills. Though I passed over it as 
gently as possible, the slight undulations produced by 
my boat extended almost as far as I could see, and gave 
a ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I w^as 
looking over the surface, I saw here and there at a dis- 
tance a faint glimmer, as if some skater insects which had 
escaped the frosts might be collected there, or, perchance, 
the surface, being so smooth, betrayed where a spring 
welled up from the bottom. Paddling gently to one of 
these places, I was surprised to find myself surrounded 
by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a. 



158 WALDEN. 

rich bronze color in the green water, sporting there and 
constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it, some- 
times leaving bubbles on it. In such transparent and 
seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I 
seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon, and 
their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hover- 
ing, as if they were a compact flock of birds passing just 
beneath my level on the right or left, their fins, like sails, 
set all around them. There were many such schools in 
the pond, apparently improving the short season before 
winter would draw an icy shutter over their broad sky- 
light, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as 
if a- slight breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. 
When I approached carelessly and alarmed them, they 
made a sudden plash and rippling with their tails, as if 
one had struck the water with a brushy bough, and in- 
stantly took refuge in the depths. At length the wind 
rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and 
the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of 
water, a hundred black points, three inches long, at once 
above the surface. Even as late as the fifth of December, 
one year, I saw some dimples on the surface, and thinking 
it was going to rain hard immediately, the air being full 
of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars and 
row homeward; already the rain seemed rapidly increas- 
ing, though I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a 
thorough soaking. But suddenly the dimples ceased, for 
they were produced by the perch, which the noise of my 
oars had scared into the depths, and I saw their schools 
dimly disappearing; so I spent a dry afternoon after all. 

An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly 
sixty years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, 
tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive 
with ducks and other water fowl, and that there were 
many eagles about it. He came here a-fishing, and used 
an old log canoe which he found on the shore. It was 
made of two white-pine logs dug out and pinned together, 
and was cut off square at the ends. It was very clumsy, 
but lasted a great many years before it became water- 
logged and perhaps sank to the bottom. He did not 
know whose it was; it belonged to the pond. He used to 



THE PONDS. 159 

make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark tied 
together. An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond 
before the Revolution, told him once that there was an 
iron chest at the bottom, and that he had seen it. Some- 
times it would come floating up to the shore; but when 
you went toward it, it would go back into deep water and 
disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log canoe, 
which took the place of an Indian one of the same ma- 
terial but more graceful construction, which perchance 
had first been a tree on the bank, and then, as it were, 
fell into the water, to float there for a generation, the 
most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that when 
I first looked into these depths there were many large 
trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which 
had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at 
the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they 
have mostly disappeared. 

When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was com- 
pletely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, 
and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees 
next the water and formed bowers under which a boat 
could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, 
and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you 
looked down from the west end, it had the appearance 
of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle. 
I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating 
over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my 
boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, 
in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was 
aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see 
what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idle- 
ness was the most attractive and productive industr}-. 
Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend 
thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not 
in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent 
them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more 
of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since 
I left those shores the wood-choppers have still further 
laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be 
no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with 
occasional vistas through which you see the water. My 



160 ■ WALDEN. 

Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How 
can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are 
cut down? 

Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log 
canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and 
the villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead 
of going to the pond to bathe or drink, arc thinking to 
bring its water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges 
at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes 
with! — to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or 
drawing of a plug! That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear- 
rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied 
the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has 
browsed off all the woods on Walden shore; that Trojan 
horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by 
mercenary Greeks! Where is the country's champion, 
the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut 
and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the 
bloated pest? 

Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, 
perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. 
Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that 
honor. Though the wood-choppers have laid bare first 
this shore and then that, and the Irish have l^uilt their 
sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, 
and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself un- 
changed, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; 
all the change is in me. It has not acquired one per- 
manent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially 
young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip apparently 
to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. It struck 
me again to-night, as if I had not seen it almost daily for 
more than twenty years, — Why, here is Walden, the 
same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago ; 
where a forest was cut down last winter another is spring- 
ing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same thought 
is welling up to its surface that was then; it is the same 
liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and 
it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man, surely, 
in whom there was no guile ! He rounded this water with 
his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in 



THE PONDS. . 161 

his will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that 
it is visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, 
Walden, is it you? 

It is no dream of mine, 

To ornament a line; 

I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven 

Than I live to Walden even. 

I am its stony shore, 

And the breeze that passes o'er; 

In the hollow of my hand 

Are its water and its sand, 

And its deepest resort 

Lies high in my thought. 

The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the 
engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passen- 
gers who have a season ticket and see it often, are better 
men for the sight. The engineer does not forget at night, 
or his nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of 
serenity and purity once at least during the day. Though 
seen but once, it helps to wash out State-street and the 
engine's soot. One proposes that it be called "God's 
Drop." 

I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, 
but it is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related 
to Flint's Pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of 
small ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other 
directly and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower, 
by a similar chain of ponds through which in some other 
geological period it may have flowed, and by a little dig- 
ging, which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither 
again. If by living thus reserved and austere, like a 
hermit in the woods, so long, it has acquired such wonder- 
ful purity, who would not regret that the comparatively 
impure waters of Flint's Pond should be mingled with it, 
or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in the ocean 
wave? 

Flint's or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake 
and inland sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is 
much larger, being said to contain one hundred and 
ninety-seven acres, and is more fertile in fish; but it is 
comparatively shallow, and not remarkably pure, A 



162 WALDEN. 

walk through the woods thither was often my recreation. 
It was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on 
your cheek freely, and see the waves run, and remember 
the life of mariners. I went a-chestnutting there in the 
fall, on windy days, when the nuts were dropping into 
the water and were washed to my feet; and one day, as 
I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in 
my face, I came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, 
the sides gone, and hardly more than the impression of 
its flat bottom left amid the rushes; yet its model was 
sharply defined, as if it were a large decayed pad, with 
its veins. It was as impressive a wreck as one could 
imagine on the sea-shore, and had as good a moral. It 
is by this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguish- 
able pond shore, through which rushes and flags have 
pushed up. I used to admire the ripple marks on the 
sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond, made firm 
and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the 
water, and the rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving 
lines, corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, 
as if the waves had planted them. There also I have 
found, in considerable quantities, curious balls, composed 
apparently of fine grass or roots, of pipewort perhaps, 
from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and per- 
fectly spherical. These wash back and forth in shallow 
water on a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the 
shore. They are either solid grass, or have a little sand 
in the middle. At first you would say that they were 
formed by the action of the waves, like a pebble; yet the 
smallest are made of equally coarse materials, half an 
inch long, and they are produced only at one season of 
the year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so 
much construct as wear down a material which has al- 
ready acquired consistency. They preserve their form 
when dry for an indefinite period. 

Flint's Pond! Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. 
What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose 
farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruth- 
lessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, 
who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a 
bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face ; who 



THE PONDS. 163 

regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as tres- 
passers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons 
from the long habit of grasping harpy-like; — so it is not 
named for me. I go not there to see him nor to hear of 
him; who neter saw it, who never bathed in it, who never 
loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good 
word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it. 
Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the 
wild fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers 
which grow by its shores, or some wild man or child the 
thread of whose history is interwoven with its own; not 
from him who could show no title to it but the deed which 
a like-minded neighbor or legislature gave him, — him who 
thought only of its money value; whose presence perchance 
cursed all the shore; who exhausted the land around it, 
and would fain have exhausted the waters within it; who 
regretted only that it was not English hay or cranberry 
meadow, — there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his 
eyes, — and would have drained and sold it for the mud at 
its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was no privi- 
lege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his farm 
where everything has its price; who w^ovild carry the land- 
scape, who would carry his God to market if he could get 
anything for Him; who goes to market /o?* his god as it is; 
on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no 
crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, 
but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose 
fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. 
Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers 
are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they 
are poor, — poor farmers. A model farm! where the house 
stands like a fungus in a muck-heap, chambers for men, 
horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and uncleansed, all con- 
tiguous to one another! Stocked with men! A great 
grease-spot, redolent of manures and buttermilk! Under 
a high state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts, 
and brains of men ! As if you were to raise your potatoes 
in the churchyard ! Such is a model farm. 

No, no ; if the fairest features of the landscape are to be 
named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest 
men alone. Let our lakes receive as true names at least as 



164 WALDEN. 

the Icarian Sea, where " still the shore " a " brave attempt 
resounds." 

Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint's; 
Fair-Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to con- 
tain some seventy acres, is d mile southwest; and White 
Pond, of about forty acres, is a mile and a half beyond 
Fair-Haven. This is my lake countiy. These, with Con- 
cord River, are my water privileges; and night and day, 
year in and year out, they grind such grist as I carry to 
them. 

Since the wood-cutters, and the railroad, and I myself 
have profaned Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not 
the most beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, 
is White Pond; — a poor name from its commonness, 
whether derived from the remarkable purity of its waters 
or the color of its sands. In these as in other respects, 
however, it is a lesser twin of Walden. They are so much 
alike that you would say they must be connected under 
ground. It has the same stony shore, and its waters are of 
the same hue. As at Walden, in sultry dog-day weather, 
looking down through the woods on some of its bays which 
are not so deep but that the reflection from the bottom 
tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluish green or glau- 
cous color. Many years since I used to go there to collect 
the sand by cart-loads, to make sand-paper with, and I 
have continued to visit it ever since. One who frequents 
it proposes to call it Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be 
called Yellow-Pine Lake, from the following circumstance. 
About fifteen years ago you could see the top of a pitch- 
pine of the kind called yellow-pine hereabouts, though it is 
not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in deep 
water, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed 
by some that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the 
primitive forest that formerly stood there. I find that 
even so long ago as 1792, in a "Topographical Description 
of the Town of Concord," by one of its citizens, in the Col- 
lections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the au- 
thor, after speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds: 
" In the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water 
is very low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place 



THE PONDS. 165 

where it now stands, although the roots are fifty feet be- 
low the surface of the water; the top of this tree is broken 
off, and at that place measures fourteen inches in diame- 
ter." In the spring of '49 I talked with the man who lives 
nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told me that it was he 
who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before. As near 
as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from 
the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. 
It was in the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the 
forenoon, and had resolved that in the afternoon, with the 
aid of his neighbors, he would take out the old yellow pine. 
He sawed a channel in the ice toward the shore, and hauled 
it over and along and out on to the ice with oxen ; but, be- 
fore he had gone far in his work, he was surprised to find 
that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the 
branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened 
in the sandy bottom. It was about a foot in diameter at 
the big end, and he had expected to get a good saw-log, 
but it was so rotten as to be fit only for fuel, if for that. 
He had some of it in his shed then. There were marks of 
an axe and of woodpeckers on the but. He thought that 
it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was 
finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had be- 
come water-logged, while the but-end was still dry and 
light, had drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, 
eighty years old, could not remember when it was not 
there. Several pretty large logs may still be seen lying on 
the bottom, where, owing to the undulation of the surface, 
they look like huge v/ater snakes in motion. 

This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there 
is little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white 
lily, which requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the 
blue flag (Iris versicolor) grows thinly in the pure water, 
rising from the stony bottom all around the shore, where 
it is visited by humming birds in June, and the color both 
of its bluish blades and its flowers, and especially their re- 
flections, are in singular harmony with the glaucous water. 

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the sur- 
face of the earth. Lakes of Light. If they M^ere perma- 
nently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they 
would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious 



166 WALDEN. 

stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being Hquid, 
and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, 
we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohi- 
noor. They are too pure to have a market vahie; they 
contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our 
lives, how much more transparent than our characters, 
are they! We never learned meanness of them. How 
much fairer than the pool before the farmer's door, in 
which his ducks swim ! Hither the clean wild ducks come. 
Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. 
The birds with their plumage and their notes are in har- 
mony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden con- 
spires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She 
flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they re- 
side. Talk of heaven ! ye disgrace earth. 



BAKER FARM. 

Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like 
temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, 
and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that 
the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in 
them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, where 
the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher 
and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creep- 
ing juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; 
or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons 
from the white-spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables 
of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful 
fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable 
winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the 
red alder-berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork 
grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the 
wild-holly berries make the beholder foVget his home with 
their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless 
other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. In- 
stead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to 
particular trees, of kinds which are rare in this neighbor- 



BAKER FARM. 1G7 

hood, ciTanding far away in the middle of some pasture, or 
in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a hill top: such as 
the black-birch, of which we have some handsome speci- 
mens two feet in diameter; its cousin the yellow-birch, 
with its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first; the 
beech, Avhich has so neat a bole and beautifully lichen 
painted, perfect in all its details, of which, excepting 
scattered specimens, I know but one small grove of sizable 
trees left in the township, supposed by some to have been 
planted by the pigeons that were once baited with beech 
nuts near b}'; it is worth the while to see the silver grain 
sparkle when you split this wood ; the bass ; the hornbeam ; 
the celtis occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but 
one well-grown; some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, 
or a more perfect hemlock than usual, standing like a 
pagoda in the midst of the woods; and many others I could 
mention. These were the shrines I visited both summer 
and winter. 

Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a 
rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the at- 
mosphere, tingeing the grass and leaves around, and daz- 
zling me as if I looked through colored crystal. It was a 
lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived 
like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged 
my employments and life. As I walked on the railroad 
causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my 
shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. 
One who visited me declared that the shadows of some 
Irishmen before him had no halo about them, that it was 
only natives that were so distinguished. Benvenuto Cellini 
tells us in his memoirs, that, after a certain terrible dream 
or vision which he had during his confinement in the castle 
of St. Angelo, a resplendent light appeared over the 
shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether he 
was in Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicuous 
when the grass was moist with dew. This was probably 
the same phenomenon to which I have referred, which is 
especially observed in the morning, but also at other 
times, and even by moonlight. Though a constant one, it 
is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable 
imagination like Cellini's, it would be basis enough for su- 



168 WALDEN. 

perstition. Besides, he tells us that he showed it to very 
few. But are they not indeed distinguished who are con- 
scious that they are regarded at all? 

I set out one afternoon to go a-fishing to Fair-Haven, 
through the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vege- 
tables. My way led through Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct 
of the Baker Farm, that retreat of which a poet has since 
sung, beginning, — 

"Thy entry is a pleasant field, 
Which some mossy fruit trees yield 
Partly to a ruddy brook, 
By gliding musquash undertook, 
And mercurial trout. 
Darting about." 

I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I 
" hooked " the apples, leaped the brook, and scared the 
musquash and the trout. It was one of those afternoons 
which seem indefinitely long before one, in which many 
events may happen, a large portion of our natural life, 
though it was already half spent when I started. By the 
way there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand 
half an hour under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and 
wearing my handkerchief for a shed; and when at length 
I had made one cast over the pickerel-weed, standing up to 
my middle in water, I found myself suddenly in the shadow 
of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble with such 
emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The 
gods must be proud, thought I, with such forked flashes 
to rout a poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste for 
shelter to the nearest hut, which stood half a mile from any 
road, but so much the nearer to the pond, and had long 
been uninhabited: — 

"And here a poet builded, 
In the completed years, 
For behold a trivial cabin 
That to destruction steers." 

So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now 
John Field, an Irishman, and his wife, and several chil- 
dren, from the broad-faced boy who assisted his father at 



BAKER FARM. 1G9 

his work, and now came running by his side from the bog 
to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-hke, cone-headed 
infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of 
nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet 
and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privi- 
lege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble 
line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of 
John Field's poor starveling brat. There we sat together 
under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it 
showered and thundered without. I had sat there many 
times of old before the ship was built that floated this 
family to America. An honest, hard-working, but shift- 
less man plainly was John Field; and his wife, she too was 
brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of 
that loft}^ stove; with round greasy face and bare breast, 
still thinking to improve her condition one da}'; with the 
never absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it 
visible anywhere. The chickens, which had also taken 
shelter here from the rain, stalked about the room like 
members of the family, too humanized methought to 
roast well. They stood and looked in my eye or pecked at 
my shoe significantly. Meanwhile my host told me his 
story, how hard he worked "bogging" for a neighboring 
farmer, turning up a meadow with a spade or bog hoe at 
the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of the land with 
manure for one year, and his little broad-faced son worked 
cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing how 
poor a bargain the latter had made. I tried to help him 
with my experience, telling him that he was one of my 
nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came a-fishing here, 
and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like him- 
self; that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which 
hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his 
commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a 
month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I did 
not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh 
meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as I 
did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost 
me but a trifle for my food ; but as he began with tea, and 
coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work 
hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he 



170 WALDEN. 

had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system, — 
and so it was as broad as it was long, indeed it was broader 
than it was long, for he was discontented and wasted his 
life into the bargain; and yet he had rated it as a gain, in 
coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, 
and meat every day. But the only true America is that 
country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of 
life as may enable you to do without these, and where the 
state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain the 
slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which di- 
rectly or indirectly result from the use of such things. For 
I purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or 
desired to be one. I should be glad if all the meadows on 
the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the conse- 
quence of men's beginning to redeem themselves. A man 
will not need to study history to find out what is best for 
his own culture. But alas ! the culture of an Irishman is an 
enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. 
I told him, that as he worked so hard at bogging, he re- 
quired thick boots and stout clothing, which yet were soon 
soiled and worn out, but I wore light shoes and thin cloth- 
ing, which cost not half so much, though he might think 
that I was dressed like a gentleman (which, however, was 
not the case), and in an hour or two, without labor, but as 
a recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I 
should want for two days, or earn enough money to sup- 
port me a week. If he and his family would live simply, 
they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their 
amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife 
stared with arms akimbo, and both appeared to be won- 
dering if they had capital enough to begin such a course 
with, or arithmetic enough to carry it through. It was 
sailing by dead reckoning to them, and they saw not 
clearly how to make their port so ; therefore I suppose they 
still take life bravely, after their fashion, face to face, giv- 
ing it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive 
columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it in de- 
tail ; — thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle 
a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelming disadvan- 
tage, — living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and 
failing so. 



BAKER FARM. 171 

"Do 3'ou ever fish?" I asked. "Oh, yes, I catch a 
mess now and then when I am lying by; good perch I 
catch." "What's your bait?" "I catch shiners with 
fish-worms, and bait the perch with them." "You'd 
better go now, John," said his wife, with glistening and 
hopeful face; but John demurred. 

The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the 
eastern woods promised a fair evening; so I took my 
departure. When I had got without I asked for a dish, 
hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my 
survey of the premises; but there, alas! are shallows and 
quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket irre- 
coverable. Meanwhile the right culinary vessel was 
selected, water was seemingly distilled, and after consul- 
tation and long delay passed out to the thirsty one, — not 
yet suffered to cool, not yet to settle. Such gruel sus- 
tains life here, I thought; so, shutting my eyes, and ex- 
cluding the motes by a skilfully directed under-current, 
I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I 
could. I am not squeamish in such cases when manners 
are concerned. 

As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain, 
bending my steps again to the pond,' my haste to catch 
pickerel, w^ading in retired meadows, in sloughs and bog- 
holes, in forlorn and savage places, appeared for an in- 
stant trivial to me who had been sent to school and col- 
lege; but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening 
west, W'ith the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint 
tinkling sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed 
air, from I know not what quarter, my Good Genius 
seemed to say, — Go fish and hunt far and wide day by 
day, — farther and wider, — and rest thee by many brooks 
and hearthsides without misgiving. Remember thy 
Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care 
before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon 
find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee 
everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than 
these, no worthier games than may here be played. 
Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and 
brakes, which will never become English hay. Let the 
thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmer's 



172 WALDEN. 

crops? that is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under 
the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to 
get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, 
but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith 
men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending 
their lives like serfs. 
O Baker Farm! 

"Landscape where the richest elemeat 
Is a httle sunshine innocent." . . , 

" No one runs to revel 
On thy rail-fenced lea." . . . 

" Debate with no man hast thou, 

With questions art never perplexed, 
As tame at the first sight as now. 

In thy plain russet gabardine dressed." . . . 

"Come ye who love. 

And ye who hate. 
Children of the Holy Dove, 

And Guy Faux of the state. 
And hang conspiracies 
From the tough rafters of the trees!" 

Men come tamely home at night only from the next 
field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and 
their life pines because it breathes its own breath over 
again; their shadows morning and evening reach farther 
than their daily steps. We should come home from far, 
from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, 
with new experience and character. 

Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had 
brought out John Field, with altered mind, letting go 
" bogging " ere this sunset. But he, poor man, disturbed 
only a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string, 
and he said it was his luck; but when he changed seats 
in the boat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field! — 
I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by 
it, — thinking to live by some derivative old country mode 
in this primitive new country, — to catch perch with 
shiners. It is good bait sometimes, I allcnv. With his 
horizon all his own, yet he a poor man, born to be poor, 
with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam's 



HIGHER LAWS. 173 

grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this world, 
he nor his posterity, till their wading, webbed, bog-trotting 
feet get talaria to their heels. 



XI. 

HIGHER LAWS. 

As I came home through the woods with my string of 
fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught 
a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and 
felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly 
tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was 
hungry then, except for that wildness which he repre- 
sented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, 
I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved 
hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind 
of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could 
have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had 
become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and 
still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, 
spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primi- 
tive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I 
love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and ad- 
venture that are in fishing still recommended it to me. I 
like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my 
day more as the animals do. Perhaps I have owed to 
this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my 
closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce 
us to and detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at 
that age, we should have little acquaintance. Fishermen, 
hunters, wood-choppers, and others, spending their lives 
in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a pai't of Nature 
themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observ- 
ing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philoso- 
phers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. 
She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveller 
on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters 
of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls 
of iSt. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller 



174 WALDEN. 

learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is 
poor authority. We are most interested when science 
reports what those men already know practically or in- 
stinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account 
of human experience. 

They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few 
amusements, because he has not so many public holidays, 
and men and boys do not play so many games as they do 
in England, for here the more primitive but solitary 
amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like have not 
yet given place to the former. Almost every New Eng- 
land boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowling- 
piece between the ages of ten and fourteen ; and his hunt- 
ing and fishing grounds were not limited like the preserves 
of an English nobleman, but were more boundless even 
than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that he did 
not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a 
change is taking place, owing, not to an increased hu- 
manity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps 
the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, 
not excepting the Humane Society. 

Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add 
fish to my fare for variety. I have actually fished from 
the same kind of necessity that the first fishers did. What- 
ever humanity I might conjure up against it was all facti- 
tious, and concerned my philosophy more than my feel- 
ings. I speak of fishing only now, for I had long felt 
differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I went 
to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, 
but I did not perceive that my feelings were much af- 
fected. I did not pity the fishes nor the worms. This was 
habit. As for fowling, during the last years that I carried 
a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, 
and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I 
am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of 
studying ornithology than this. It requires so much 
closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that 
reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet 
notwithstanding the objection on the score of humanity, 
I am compelled to doubt if equally valuable sports are 
ever substituted for these; and when some of my friends 



HIGHER LAWS. 175 

have asked me anxiousl}^ about their boys, whether they 
should let them hunt, I have answered, yes, — remember- 
ing that it was one of the best parts of my education, — 
make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if 
possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not 
find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable 
wilderness, — hunters as well as fishers of men. Thus far 
I am of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who 

"yave not of the text a pulled hen 
That saith that hunters ben not holy men." 

There is a j^eriod in the history of the individual, as of 
the race, when the hunters are the "best men," as the 
Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the boy 
who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while 
his education has been sadty neglected. This was my 
answer with respect to those youths who were bent on 
this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. 
No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, 
will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life 
by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extrem- 
ity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my 
sympathies do not always make the usual ]A\\\anthropic 
distinctions. 

Such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the 
forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes 
thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he 
has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his 
proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and 
leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men 
are still and always young in this respect. In some 
countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such 
a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from 
being the Good Shepherd. I have been surprised to con- 
sider that the only obvious employment, except wood- 
chopping, ice-cutting, or the like business, which ever to 
my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a whole half 
day any of my fellow-citizens, whether fathers or children 
of the town, with just one exception, was fishing. Com- 
monly they did not think that they were lucky, or well 
paid for their time, unless they got a long string of fish, 



176 WALDEN. 

though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond all 
the while. They might go there a thousand times before 
the sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and 
leave their purpose pure; but no doubt such a clarifying 
process would be going on all the while. The governor 
and his council faintly remember the pond, for they went 
a-fishing there when they were bo3^s; but now they are 
too old and dignified to go a-fishing, and so they know 
it no' more forever. Yet even they expect to go to heaven 
at last. If the legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regu- 
late the number of hooks to be used there; but they 
know nothing about the hook of hooks with which to 
angle for the pond itself, empaling the legislature for a 
bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the embryo 
man passes through the hunter stage of development. 

I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot 
jfish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried 
it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of 
my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from 
time to time; but always when I have done I feel that it 
would have been better if I had not fished. I think that 
I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the 
first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this 
instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of crea- 
tion; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though 
without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am 
no fisherman at ail. But I see that if I were to live in a 
wilderness I should again be tempted to become a fisher 
and hunter in earnest. Besides, there is something 
essentially unclean about this diet, and all flesh, and I 
began to see where housework commences, and whence 
the endeavor, which costs so much, to wear a tidy and 
respectable appearance, each day, to keep the house 
sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having been 
my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the 
gentleman for whom the dishes were served up, I can 
speak from an unusually complete experience. The 
practical objection to animal food in my case was its 
uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned 
and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have 
fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, 



HIGHER LAWS. 177 

and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few 
potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and 
filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for 
many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not 
so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to 
them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagina- 
tion. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of 
experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beauti- 
ful to live low and fare hard in many respects ; and though 
I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagina- 
tion. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest 
to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best con- 
dition has been particularly inclined to abstain from 
animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a 
significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in 
Kirby and Spcnce, that "some insects in their perfect 
state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no 
use of them;" and they lay it down as ''a general rule, 
that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in 
that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar when trans- 
formed into a butterfly," . . . "and the gluttonous 
maggot when become a fly," content themselves with a 
drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The 
abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents 
the larva. This is the tidbit which tempts his insectivo- 
rous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; 
and there are whole nations in that condition, nations 
without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens be- 
tray them. 

It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a 
diet as will not offend the imagination; but this, I think, 
is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit 
down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. 
The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed 
of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. 
But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will 
poison you. It is not worth the while to live by rich 
cookery. Most men would feel shame if caught preparing 
with their own hands precise^ such a dinner, whether of 
animal or vegetable food, as is every day prepared for 
them by others. Yet till this is otherwise we are not 



178 WALDEN. 

civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men 
and women. This certainly suggests what change is to 
be made. It may be vain to ask why the imagination 
will not be reconciled to flesh and fat. I am satisfied that 
it is not. Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous 
animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, 
by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way, — 
as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering 
lambs, may learn, — and he will be regarded as a bene- 
factor of his race w^ho shall teach man to confine himself 
to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my 
own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of 
the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, 
to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes 
have left off eating each other when they came in con- 
tact with the more civilized. 

If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions 
of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to 
what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and 
yet that v/ay, as he grows more resolute and faithful, 
his road lies. The faintest assured objection which one 
healthy man feels will at length prevail over the argu- 
ments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed 
his genius till it misled him. Though the result were 
bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the 
consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life 
in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the 
night are such that you greet them with joy, and life 
emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, 
is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, — that is 
your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you 
have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest 
gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. 
We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget 
them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts 
most astounding and most real are never communicated 
by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is 
somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints 
of morning or evening. It is a little Stardust caught, a 
segment of the rainbow which I have clutched. 

Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; 



HIGHER LAWS. 179 

I could sometimes cat a fried rat with a good relish, if it 
were necessary. I am glad to have drunk water so long, 
for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an 
opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always; 
and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe 
that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not 
so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes cf a 
morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with 
a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by 
them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such appar- 
enth' slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will 
destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who does 
not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I 
have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse 
labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and 
drink coarsely also. But to tell the truth, I find myself 
at present somewhat less particular in these respects. I 
carry less religion to the table, ask no blessing; not be- 
cause I am wiser than I was, but, I am obliged to confess, 
because, however much it is to be regretted, with years I 
have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these 
questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe 
of poetry. M)' practice is "nowhere," my opinion is here. 
Nevertheless I am far from regarding myself as one of 
those privileged ones to whom the Ved refers when it 
says that "he who has true faith in the Omnipresent 
Supreme Being may eat all that exists," that is, is not 
bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it; and 
even in their case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo com- 
mentator has remarked, that the Vedant limits this privi- 
lege to "the time of distress." 

Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satis- 
faction from his food in which appetite had no share? I 
have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental percep- 
tion to the commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been 
inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had 
eaten on a hillside had fed my genius. " The soul not being 
mistress of herself," says Thseng-tseu, "one looks, and one 
does not see; one listens, and one does not hear; one eats, 
and one does not know the savor of food." He who dis- 
tinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; 



180 WALDEN. 

he who does not cannot be otherwise. A puritan may go 
to his brown-bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever 
an alderman to his turtle. Not that food which entereth 
into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which 
it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but 
the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten 
is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual 
life, but food for the worms that possess us. If the hunter 
has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such sav- 
age tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of 
a calf's foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are 
even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. 
The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy 
beastly life, eating and drinking. 

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an 
instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the 
only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp 
which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this 
"which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for 
the Universe's Insurance Company, recommending its 
laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we 
pay. Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws 
of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the 
side of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr for some 
reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who 
does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop 
but the charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome 
noise, go a long way off, is heard as music, a proud sweet 
satire on the meanness of our lives. 

We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in 
proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and 
sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the 
worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. 
Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its 
nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its 
own; that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day I 
picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound 
teeth and tusks, which suggested that there was an animal 
health and vigor distinct from the spiritual. This creature 
succeeded by other means than temperance and purity. 
"That in which men differ from brute beasts," says Men- 



HIGHER LAWS. 181 

cius, "is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd 
lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully." 
Who knows what sort of life would result if we had at- 
tained to purity? If I knew so wise a man as could teach 
me purity I would go to seek him forthwith. "A com- 
mand over our passions, and over the external senses of 
the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be in- 
dispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet 
the spirit can for the time pervade and control every mem- 
ber and function of the body, and transmute what in form 
is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The 
generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates 
and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates 
and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and 
what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, 
are but various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at, once 
to God when the channel of purity is open. By turns our 
purity inspires and our impurity casts us down. He is 
blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him 
day by da}-, and the divine being established. Perhaps 
there is none but has cause for shame on account of the in- 
ferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I fear that 
we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the 
divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, 
to some extent, our very life is our disgrace. — 

" How happy's he who hath due place assigned 
To his beasts and disafforested his mind! 

Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast, 

And is not ass himself to all the rest! 

Else man not only is the herd of swine. 

But he's those devils too which did incline 

Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse." 

All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all 
purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, 
or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, 
and we only need to see a person do any one of these things 
to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can 
neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is at- 
tacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at 
another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. 



182 WALDEN. 

What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? 
He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but 
we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the 
rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom 
and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the 
student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An un- 
clean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a 
stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes 
without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, 
and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a 
stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be 
overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you 
are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no 
more, if you are not more religious? I know of many sys- 
tems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill 
the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, 
though it be to the performance of rites merely. 

I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the 
subject, — I care not how" obscene my ivords are, — but be- 
cause I cannot speak of them without betraying my im- 
purity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of 
sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so de- 
graded that we cannot speak simpty of the necessary 
functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some coun- 
tries, every function was reverently spoken of and regu- 
lated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo law- 
giver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He 
teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and 
urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not 
falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles. 

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, 
to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor 
can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all 
sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh 
and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to re- 
fine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to im- 
brute them. 

John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, 
after a hard day's work, his mind still running, on his la- 
bor more or less. Having bathed he sat down to recreate 
his intellectual man. It was a rather cool evening, and 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 183 

some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost. He had 
not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he 
heard some one pUiying on a flute, and that sound har- 
monized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but 
the burden of his thought was that though this kept run- 
ning in his head, and he found himself planning and con- 
triving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. 
It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was con- 
stantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home 
to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, 
and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered 
in him. They gently did away with the street, and the 
village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to 
him, — Why do j'ou stay here and live this mean moiling 
life, when a glorious existence is possible for j^ou? Those 
same stars twinkle over other fields than these. — But how 
to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? 
All that he could think of was to practise some new aus- 
terity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem 
it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. 



XII. 

BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 

Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came 
through the village to my house from the other side of the 
town, and the catching of the dinner was as much a social 
exercise as the eating of it. 

Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. I have 
not heard so much as a locust over the sweet-fern these 
three hours. The pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts, 
— no flutter from them. Was that a farmer's noon horn 
which sounded from beyond the woods just now? The 
hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and In- 
dian bread. W'hy will men worry themselves so? He 
that does not eat need not work. I wonder how much 
they have reaped. Who would live there where a body can 
never think for the barking of Bose? And oh, the house- 
keeping! to keep bright the devil's door-knobs, and scour 



184 WALDEN. 

his tubs this bright day ! Better not keep a house. Say, 
some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner- 
parties! Only a wood-pecker tapping. Oh, the}^ swarm; 
the sun is too warm there: they are born too far into life 
for me. I have water from the spring, and a loaf of brown 
bread on the shelf. — Hark ! I hear a rustling of the leaves. 
Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of 
the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, 
whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my 
sumachs and sweet-briers tremble. — Eh, Mr. Poet, is it 
you? How do you like the world to-day? 

Poet. See those clouds; how they hang! That's the 
greatest thing I have seen to-day. There's nothing like 
it in old paintings, nothing like it in foreign lands, — unless 
when we were off the coast of Spain. That's a true Med- 
iterranean sky. I thought, as I have my living to get, and 
have not eaten to-day, that I might go a-fishing. That's 
the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have 
learned. Come, let's along. 

Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be 
gone. I will go with you gladly soon, but I am just con- 
cluding a serious meditation. I think that I am near the 
end of it. Leave me alone, then, for a while. But that we 
may not be delayed, you shall be digging the bait mean- 
while. Angle-worms are rarely to be met with in these 
parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure; the 
race is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is 
nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's ap- 
petite is not too keen; and this you may have all to your- 
self to-day. I would advise you to set in the spade down 
yonder among the ground-nuts, where you see the johns- 
wort waving. I think that I may warrant you one worm 
to every three sods you turn up, if you look well in among 
the roots of the grass, as if you were weeding. Oi', if you 
choose to go farther, it will not be unwise, for I have found 
the increase of fair bait to be veiy nearly as the squares of 
the distances. 

Hermit alone. Let me see, where was I? Methinks I was 
nearly in this frame of mind; the world lay about at this 
angle. Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? If I should soon 
bring this meditation to an end, would another so sweet 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 185 

occasion be likely to offer? I was as near being resolved 
into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear 
my thoughts will not come back to me. If it would do any 
good, I would whistle for them. When they make us an 
offer, is it wise to say, We will think of it? My thoughts 
have left no track, and I cannot find the path again. What 
was it that I was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. I 
wall just try these three sentences of Con-fut-see; they may 
fetch that state about again. I know not whether it was 
the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem. There never is 
but one opportunity of a kind. 

Poet. How now. Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just 
thirteen whole ones, besides several which are imperfect 
or undersized ; but they will do for the smaller fry ; they do 
not cover up the hook so much. Those village worms are 
quite too large; a shiner may make a meal off one without 
finding the skewer. 

Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Con- 
cord? There's good sport there if the water be not too 
high. 

Why do precisely these objects which we behold make 
a world? Why has man just these species of animals for 
his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled 
this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals 
to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a 
sense, made to cany some portion of our thoughts. 

The mice which haunted my house were not the com- 
mon ones, which are said to have been introduced into 
the country, but a wild native kind not found in the vil- 
lage. I sent one to a distinguished naturalist, and it in- 
terested him rpuch. When I was building, one of these 
had its nest undei-neath the house, and before I had laid 
the second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come 
out regularly at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my 
feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon 
became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up 
my clothes. It could readily ascend the sides of the room 
by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its 
motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on the 
bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, 



186 WALDEN. 

and round and round the paper which held m}^ dinner, 
while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo- 
peep with it ; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese 
between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, 
sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its face and 
paws, like a fly, and walked away. 

A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for pro- 
tection in a pine which grew against the house. In June 
the partridge {Tetrao umbdlus), which is so shy a bird, led 
her brood past my windows, from the woods in the rear to 
the front of my house, clucking and calling to them like 
a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself the hen of the 
woods. The young suddenly disperse on your approach, 
at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept 
them away, and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves 
and twigs that many a traveller has placed his foot in the 
midst of a brood, and heard the whir of the old bird as she 
flew off, and her anxious calls and mewing, or seen her 
trail her wings to attract his attention, without suspecting 
their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes roll and 
spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you cannot, 
for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The 
young squat still and flat, often running their heads under 
a leaf, and mind only their mother's directions given from 
a distance, nor wall your approach make them run again 
and betray themselves. You may even tread on them, or 
have your ej^es on them for a minute, without discovering 
them. I have held them in my open hand at such a time, 
and still their only care, obedient to their mother and their 
instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. So 
perfect is this instinct, that once, when I had laid them on 
the leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it 
was found with the rest in exactly the same position ten 
minutes afterward. They are not callow like the young of 
most birds, but more perfectly developed and precocious 
even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent 
expression of their open and serene eyes is very memorable. 
All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest not 
merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by ex- 
perience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, 
but is coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 187 

yield another such gem. The traveller does not often look 
into such a limpid well. The ignorant or reckless sports- 
man often shoots the parent at such a time, and leaves 
these innocents to fall a prey to some prowling beast or 
bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves which 
they so much resemble. It is said that when hatched b}' a 
hen they will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are 
lost, for they never hear the mother's call which gathers 
them again. These were my hens and chickens. 

It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free 
though secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves 
in the neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. 
How retired the otter manages to live here ! He grows to 
be four feet long, as big as a small bo}^, perhaps without 
any human being getting a glimpse of him. I formerly 
saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house is 
built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night. 
Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, 
after planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a 
spring which was the source of a swamp and of a brook, 
oozing from under Brister's Hill, half a mile from my 
field. The approach to this was through a succession of 
descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch-pines, 
into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very 
secluded and shaded spot, under a spreading white-pine, 
there was yet a clean firm sward to sit on. I had dug out 
the spring and made a well of clear gray water, Avhere I 
could dip up a pailful without roiling it, and thither I 
went for this purpose almost every day in midsummer, 
when the pond was warmest. Thither too the wood-cock 
led her brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a 
foot above them down the bank, while they ran in a troop 
beneath; but at last, spying me, she would leave her 
young and circle round and round me, nearer and nearer 
till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and 
legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who 
would already have taken up their march, with faint 
wiry peep, single file through the swamp, as she directed. 
Or I heard the peep of the young when I could not see 
the parent bird. There too the turtle-doves sat over the 
spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the soft white- 



188 WALDEN. 

pines over ni}^ head; or the red squirrel, coursing down 
the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisi- 
tive. You only need sit still long enough in some attrac- 
tive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit 
themselves to you by turns. 

I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. 
One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my 
pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the 
other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, 
fiercely contending with one another. Having once got 
hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and 
rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was 
surprised to find that the chips were covered with such 
combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a helium, a 
war between two races of ants, the red always pitted 
against the black, and frequently two red ones to one 
black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the 
hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground w^as 
already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and 
black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, 
the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was rag- 
ing; internecine w^ar; the red republicans on the one hand, 
and the black imperialists on the other. On every side 
they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any 
noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought 
so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked 
in each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid 
the chips, now at noonday prepared to fight till the sun 
went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion 
had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, 
and through all the tumblings on that field never for an 
instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, 
having already caused the other to go by the board ; while 
the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, 
as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of 
several of his members. They fought with more perti- 
nacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least 
disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle- 
cry was Conquer or die. In the meanwhile there came 
along a single red ant on the hill side of this valley, evi- 
dently full of excitement, who either had despatched his 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 189 

foo, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the 
latter, for he had lost none of his limbs ; whose mother had 
chargetl him to return with his shield or upon it. Or 
perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his 
wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his 
Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar, — for 
the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red, — he 
drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within 
half an inch of the combatants; then, w^atching his oppor- 
tunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced 
his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving 
the foe to select among his own members; and so there 
were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction 
had been invented which put all other locks and cements 
to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to 
find that they had their respective musical bands sta- 
tioned on some eminent chip, and playing their national 
airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying 
combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if 
they had been men. The mora you think of it, the less 
the difference. And certainly there is not the fight re- 
corded in Concord histor}'^, at least, if in the histor}- of 
America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, 
whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patri- 
otism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for car- 
nage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! 
Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard 
wounded! Why, here every ant was a Buttrick, — "Fire! 
for God's sake fire!" — and thousands shared the fate of 
Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. 
I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, 
as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny 
tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as 
important and memorable to those whom it concerns as 
those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. 

I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly 
described w^re struggling, carried it into my house, and 
placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to 
see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned 
red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing 
at the near fore-leg of his enemy, having severed his 



190 WALDEX. 

remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, expos- 
ing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black 
warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for 
him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's 
eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. 
They struggled half an hour longer under the tumbler, 
and when I looked again the black soldier had severed 
the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living 
heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly tro- 
phies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened 
as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, 
being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, 
and I know not how many other wounds, to divest him- 
self of them ; which at length, after half an hour more, he 
accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over 
the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally 
survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his 
days in some Hotel des Invalidcs, I do not know; but I 
thought that his industry would not be worth much there- 
after. I never learned which party was victorious, nor 
the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as 
if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witness- 
ing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human 
battle before my door. 

Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have 
long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, 
though they say that Hubcr is the only modern author 
wdio appears to have witnessed them, "^neas Sylvius," 
say they, " after giving a very circumstantial account of 
one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small 
species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that "'This 
action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the 
Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an 
eminent lawyer, who related the whole- history of the 
battle with the greatest fidelity.' A similar engagement 
between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus, 
in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have 
buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of 
their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This event 
happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant Chris- 
tiern the Second from Sweden." The battle which I 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 191 

witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years 
before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill. 
• Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mud-turtle in 
a victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the 
woods, without the knowledge of his master, and ineffectu- 
ally smelled at old fox burrows and woodchucks' holes; 
led perchance by some slight cur which nimbly threadecl 
the wood, and might still inspire a natural terror in its 
denizens; now far behind his guide, barking like a canine 
bull toward some small squirrel Avhich had treed itself for 
scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his 
weight, imagining that he is on the track of some stray 
member of the jerbilla family. Once I was surprised to 
see a cat walking along the stony shore of the pond, for 
they rarely wander so far from home. The surprise was 
mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat, which has 
lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the 
woods, and, by her sly ancl stealthy iDehavior, proves her- 
self more native there than the regular inhabitants. 
Once, when berrying, I met with a cat with young kittens 
in the woods, quite wild, and they all, like their mother, 
had their backs up and were fiercely spitting at me. A 
few j^ears before I lived in the woods there was what was 
called a "winged cat" in one of the farm-houses in Lin- 
coln nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker's. When I called 
to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the 
woods, as was her v/ont (I am not sure whether it was a 
male or female, and so use the more common pronoun), 
but her mistress told me that she came into the neighbor- 
hood a little more than a year before, in April, and was 
finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark 
brownish gray color, with a white spot on her throat, and 
white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in 
the winter the fur grew thick and flatted out along her 
sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long by two 
and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper 
side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring 
these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of 
her ''wings," which I keep still. There is no appearance 
of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part 
flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not 



192 WALDEN. 

impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids 
have been produced by the union of the marten and do- 
mestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat 
for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a 
poet's cat be winged as well as his horse? 

In the fall the loon {Colymhus glacialis) came, as usual, 
to moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring 
with his wild laughter before I had risen. At rumor of 
his arrival all the Mill-dam sportsmen are on the alert, 
in gigs and on foot, two by two and three by three, with 
patent rifles and conical balls and spy-glasses. They 
come rustling through the woods like autumn leaves, at 
least ten men to one loon. Some station themselves on 
this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird can- 
not be omnipresent ; if he dive here he must come up there. 
But now the kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves 
and rippling the surfr.ce of the water, so that no loon can 
be heard or seen, tl.ough his foes sweep the pond with 
spy-glasses, and mcAiQ the woods resound with their dis- 
charges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily, 
taking sides with all water-fowl, and our sportsmen must 
beat a retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But 
they were too often successful. When I went to get a 
pail of water early in the morning I frequently saw this 
stately bird sailing out of my cove within a few rods. If 
I endeavored to overtake him in' a boat, in order to see 
how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely 
lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till 
the latter part of the day. But I was more than a match 
for him on the surface. He commonly went off in a rain. 

As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm 
October afternoon, for such days especially they settle 
on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked 
in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out 
from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of 
me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pur- 
sued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I 
was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalcu- 
lated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods 
apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had 
helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long 



BRUTE NEIGHBORS. 193 

and loud, and with more reason than before. He ma- 
noeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a 
dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the sur- 
face, turning his head this way and that, he coolly sur- 
veyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his 
course so that he might come up where there was the 
widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance 
from the boat. It was surprising how cjuickl}^ he made 
up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led 
me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not 
be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in 
his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in 
mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth sur- 
face of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your 
adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and 
the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will 
appear again. Sometimes he would come up unexpect- 
edly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed 
directly under the boat. So long winded was he and so 
unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would 
immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit 
could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth 
surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he 
had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in 
its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught 
in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, 
with hooks set for trout, — though Walden is deeper than 
that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this un- 
gainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid 
their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as 
surely uncicr water as on the surface , and swam much 
faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he ap- 
proached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, 
and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well 
for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to 
endeavor to calculate w^here he would rise; for again and 
again, when I was straining my eyes over the surface one 
way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh 
behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, 
did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up 
by that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough 



194 WALDEN. 

betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I 
could commonly hear the plash of the water when he 
came up, and so also detected him. But after an hour he 
seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly and swam yet 
farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely 
he sailed off with unruffled breast wncn he came to the 
surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. 
His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat 
like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had 
balked nie most successfully and come up a long way off, 
he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more 
like that of a wolf than any bird ; as when a. beast puts his 
muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was 
his looning, — perhaps the wildest sound that is ever 
heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I con- 
cluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident 
of his own resources. Though the sky was by this time 
overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where 
he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His white 
breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the 
water were all against him. At length, having come up 
fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, 
as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immedi- 
ately there came a wind from the east and rippled the 
surface, and filled the whole air with, misty rain, and I 
was impressed as if it were the pra^-er of the loon answered, 
and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disap- 
pearing far away on the tumultuous surface. 

For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly 
tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from 
the sportsman; tricks which they will have less need to 
practice in Louisiana bayous. When compelled to rise 
they would sometimes circle round and round and over 
the pond at a considerable height, from which they could 
easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes 
in the sky; and when I thought they had gone off thither 
long since, they would settle down by a slanting flight of 
a quarter of a mile on to a distant part which was left 
free; but what besides safety they got by sailing in the 
middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its 
water for the same reason that I do. 



HOUSE-WARMING. 195 

XIII. 

HOUSE-WAEMING. 

In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and 
loaded myself with clusters more precious for their beauty 
and fragrance than for food. There too I admired, though 
I did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pend- 
ants of the meadow grass, pearly and red, Avhich the 
farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the smooth 
meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the 
bushel and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads 
to Boston and New York; destined to be jammed, to satisfy 
the tastes of lovers of Nature there. So butchers rake the 
tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the 
torn and drooping plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit 
was likewise food for my eyes merely; but I collected a 
small store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprie- 
tors and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were 
ripe I laitl up half a bushel for winter. It was very excit- 
ing at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut 
woods of Lincoln, — they now sleep their long sleep under 
the railroad, — with a bag on my shoulder, and a stick to 
open burrs with in my hand, for I did not always wait for 
the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud reproofs 
of the red-squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed 
nuts I sometimes stole, for the burrs which they had se- 
lected were sure to contain sound ones. Occasionally I 
climbed and shook the trees. They grew also behind my 
house, and one large tree which almost overshadowed it 
was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the whole 
neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of 
its fruit ; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and 
picking the nuts out of the burrs before they fell. I re- 
linquished these trees to them and visited the more dis- 
tant woods composed wholly of chestnut. These nuts, as 
far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. Many 
other subvStitutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging one 
day for fish-worms I discovered the ground-nut (Apios 
tuber osa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort 



196 WALDEN. 

of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever 
dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not 
dreamed it. I had often since seen its crimpled red velvety 
blossom supported by the stems of other plants without 
knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well-nigh ex- 
terminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a 
frostbitten potato, and I found it better boiled than 
roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature 
to rear her own children and feed them simply here at 
some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and 
waving grain-fields, this humble root, which was once the 
totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only 
by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here once 
more, and the tender and luxurious English grains will 
probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without 
the care of man the crow may carry back even the last 
seed of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian's God in 
the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it; but 
the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps 
revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove it- 
self indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and 
dignity as the cliet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian Ceres 
or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of 
it; and when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves 
and string of nuts may be represented on our works of art. 
• Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or 
three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath 
where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the 
point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, man}' a tale 
their color toldi And gradually from week to week the 
character of each tree came out, and it admired itself re- 
flected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning 
the manager of this galler}' substituted some new picture, 
distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for 
the old upon the walls. 

The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as 
to winter cjuarters, and settled on my windows within and 
on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from 
entering. Each morning, when they were numbed with 
cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble my- 
self much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by 



HOUSE-WARMING. 197 

their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They 
never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me; 
and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do 
not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold. 

Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quar- 
ters in November, I used to resort to the northeast side of 
Walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch-pine 
woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of the pond; 
it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by 
the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus 
warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the 
summer, like a departed hunter, had left. 

When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. 
My bricks being second-hand ones required to be cleaned 
with a trowel, so that I learned more than usual of the 
qualities of bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was 
fifty years old, and was said to be still growing harder; but 
this is one of those sayings which men love to repeat 
whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves 
grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would 
take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of 
them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of 
second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from 
the ruins of Babylon, and the cement on them is older and 
probably harder still. However that may be, I was struck 
by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore so many 
violent blows without being worn out. As my bricks had 
been in a chimney before, though I did not read the name 
of Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out as many fire- 
place bricks as I could find, to save work and waste, and I 
filled the spaces between the bricks about the fireplace 
with stones from the pond shore, and also made my mor- 
tar with the white sand from the same place. I lingered 
most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the 
house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I 
commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of 
bricks raised a few inches above the floor served for my 
pillow at night ; yet I did not get a stiff neck for it that I 
remember; my stiff neck is of older date. I took a poet to 
board for a fortnight about those times, which caused me 



198 WALDEN. 

to be put to it for room. He brought his own knife, though 
I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them 
into the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. 
I was pleased to see my work rising so square and solid by 
degrees, and reflected that, if it proceeded slowly, it was 
calculated to endure a long time. The chimney is to some 
extent an independent structure, standing on the ground 
and rising through the house to the heavens; even after 
the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its im- 
portance and independence are apparent. This was to- 
ward the end of summer. It was now November. 

The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, 
though it took many weeks of steady blowing to accom- 
plish it, it is so deep. When I began to have a fire at 
evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried 
smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks 
between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings 
in that cool and aiiy apartment, surrounded by the rough 
brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the bark on 
high overhead. My house never pleased my eye so much 
after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess 
that it was more comfortable. Should not every apart- 
ment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some 
obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at 
evening about the rafters? These forms are more agree- 
able to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings 
or the most expensive furniture. I now first began to 
.iihabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for 
warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire- 
dogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me good 
to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I 
had built, and I poked the fire with more right and more 
satisfaction than usual. My dwelling was small, and I 
could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger 
for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. 
All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one 
room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; 
and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or serv- 
ant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato 
says, the master of a family {jyatremfamilias) must have in 



HOUSE-WARMING. 199 

his rustic villa '^cellam olcariam, vinariam, dolia miilta, 
uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae 
erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that 
it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his 
advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a 
firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the wee- 
vil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, 
and of lyo and Indian meal a peck each. 

I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, 
standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and with- 
out gingerbread-work, which shall still consist of only one 
room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without 
ceiling or plastering, -with bare rafters and purlins sup- 
porting a sort of lower heaven over one's head, — useful to 
keep off rain and snow; where the king and queen posts 
stand out to receive your homage, when you have done 
reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on 
stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you 
must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where 
some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a win- 
dow, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, 
some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, 
if they choose; a house wdiich you have got into when you 
have opened the outside door^ and the ceremony is over; 
where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and con- 
verse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter 
as 5'ou would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, con- 
taining all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house- 
keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at 
one view, and everything hangs upon its peg that a man 
should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, 
store-house, and garret; where you can see so necessary a 
thing as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a 
cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to 
the fire that cooks your dinner and the oven that bakes 
your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are 
the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor 
the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes 
requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook 
would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the 
ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. 



200 WALDEN. 

A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's 
nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the 
back without seeing some of its inhabitants ; where to be a 
guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and 
not to he carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut 
up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home 
there, — in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does 
not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to 
build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospi- 
tality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. 
There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a 
design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on 
many a man's premises, and might have been legally 
ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many 
men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and 
queen who lived simply in such a house as I have de- 
scribed, if I w^ere going their way; but backing out of a 
modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever 
I am caught in one. 

It w^ould seem as if the very language of our parlors 
would lose all its nerve and degenerate into 'parlaver 
wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its sym- 
bols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far 
fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in 
other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and work- 
shop. The dinner even is onl}^ the parable of a dinner, 
commonl}'. As if only the savage dwelt near enough to 
Nature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can 
the scholar, wdio dwells aw^ay in the North West Territory 
or the Isle of Man, tell what is parliamentary in the 
kitchen? 

However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold 
enough to stay and eat a hast,v-pudding with me; but 
when they saw that crisis approaching they beat a hasty 
retreat rather, as if it would shake the house to its founda- 
tions. Nevertheless, it stood through a great many hasty- 
puddings. 

I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought 
over some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose, from 
the opposite shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of convey- 
ance which would have tempted me to go much farther if 



HOUSE-WARMING. 201 

necessary. My house had in the meanwhile been shingled 
down to the ground on every side. In lathing I was 
pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single 
blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer 
the plaster f j'om the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. 
I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine 
clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving 
advice to workmen. Venturing one day to substitute 
deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's 
board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with 
a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a 
bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his com- 
plete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his 
ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy and con- 
venience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the 
cold and takes a handsome finish, and I learned the vari- 
ous casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I was sur- 
prised to see how thirsty the bricks were, which drank up 
all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, 
and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new 
hearth. I had the previous winter made a small quantity 
of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, which 
our river affords, for the sake of the experiment ; so that I 
knew where my materials came from. I might have got 
good limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, 
if I had cared to do so. 

The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the 
shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks 
before the general freezing. The first ice is especially in- 
teresting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, 
and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for ex- 
amining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at 
3'our length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect 
on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your 
leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture be- 
hind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth 
then. There are many furrows in the sand where some 
creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; 
and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of cadis worms 
made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these 
have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the fur- 



202 WALDEN. 

rows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. 
But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you 
must improve the earHest opportunity to study it. If you 
examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find 
that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first ap- 
peared to be within it, are against its under surface, and 
that more are continually rising from the bottom; while 
the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you 
see the water through it. These bubbles are from an 
eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear 
and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them 
through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to 
a square inch. There are also already within the ice nar- 
row oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, 
sharp cones with the apex upward ; or of tener, if the ice is 
quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles, one directly above 
another, like a string of beads. But these within the ice 
are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I 
sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the 
ice, and those which broke through carried in air with 
them, which formed very large and conspicuous white 
bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same place 
forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large bub- 
bles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had 
formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of 
a cake. But as the last two days had been very warm, like 
an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, show- 
ing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but 
opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was 
hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly 
expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their 
regularity; they were no longer one directly over another, 
but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one over- 
lapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight 
cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too 
late to stud}' the bottom. Being curious to know what 
position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new 
ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling-sized one, 
and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed 
around and under the bubble, so that it was included be- 
tween the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but 



i 



HOUSE-WARMING. 203 

close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps 
sHghtly lenticuhir, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an 
inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised 
to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted 
with great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to 
the height of five-eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving 
a thin partition there between the water and the bubble, 
hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the 
small ])ubbles in this partition had burst out dowaiward, 
and probably there was no ice at all under the largest 
bubbles, which Avcre a foot in diameter. I inferred that 
the infinite number of minutes bubbles which I had first 
seen against the under surface of the ice were now frozen 
in likewise, and thp„t each, in its degree, had operated like 
a burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. 
These are the little air guns which contribute to maice the 
ice crack and whoop. 

At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I had 
finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the 
house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. 
Night after night the geese came lumbering in in the dark 
with a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the 
ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, 
and some flying low over the woods toward Fair-Haven, 
bound for Mexico. Several times, when returning from 
the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night, I heard the 
tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the dry leaves in 
the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they 
had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their 
leader as they hurried off. In 1845 Walden froze entirely 
over for the first time on the night of the 22d of December, 
Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having 
been frozen ten days or more; in '46, the 16th; in '49, about 
the 31st; and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, 
the 5th of January; in '53, the 31st of December. The 
snow had already covered the ground since the 25th of 
November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery 
of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and en- 
deavored to keep a bright fire both wnthin my house and 
within my breast. My employment out of doors now was 



204 WALDEN. 

to collect the dead wood in the forest, bringing it in my 
hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a dead 
pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence 
which had seen its best days was a great haul for me. I 
sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god 
Terminus. How" much more interesting an event is that 
man's supper Avho has just been forth in the snow to hunt, 
nay, you may say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! His 
bread and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and 
waste wood of all kinds in the forests of most of our towns 
to support many fires, but which at present warm none, 
and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood. 
There was also the drift-wood of the pond. In the course 
of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch-pine logs 
with the bark on, pinned together by the Irish when the 
railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the shore. 
After soaking two years and then lying high six months it 
was perfectly sound, though water-logged past drying. I 
amused myself one winter day with sliding this piece-meal 
across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with 
one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the 
other on the ice; or I tied several logs together wdth a birch 
withe, and then, with a longer birch or alder which had a 
hook at the end, dragged them across. Though com- 
pletely waterlogged and almost as heavy as lead, they not 
only burned long, but made a very hot fire; nay, I thought 
that they burned better for the soaking, as if the pitch, 
being confined by the water, burned longer as in a lamp. 

Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, 
says that "the encroachments of trespassers, and the 
houses and fences thus raised on the borders of the forest," 
were " considered as great nuisances by the old forest law, 
and were severely punished under the name of purpres- 
tures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum — ad nocumentuni 
forestaa% &c.," to the frightening of the game and the det- 
riment of the forest. But I was interested in the preserva- 
tion of the venison and the vert more than the hunters or 
wood-choppers, and as much as though I had been the 
Lord Warden himself; and if any part was burned, though 
I burned it myself by accident, I grieved with a grief that 
lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that of the 



HOUSE-WARMING. 205 

proprietors; nay, I grieved when it was cut clown by the 
proprietors themselves. I would that our farmers when 
they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old 
Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, 
a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would be- 
lieve that it is sacred to some god. The Roman made an 
expiatory offering, and praj^ed. Whatever god or goddess 
thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me, 
my famil}', and children, &c. 

It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even 
in this age and in this new country, a value more perma- 
nent and universal than that of gold. After all our dis- 
coveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. 
It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman 
ancestors. If they made their baws of it, we make our 
gun-stocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty years ago, 
says that the price of wood for fuel in New York and Phila- 
delphia '■ nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the 
best wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually 
requires more than three hundred thousand cords, and is 
surrounded to the distance of three hundred miles by cul- 
tivated plains." In this town the price of wood rises al- 
most steadily, and the only question is, how much higher 
it is to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics and 
tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other 
errand, are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay 
a high price for the privilege of gleaning after the wood- 
chopper. It is now many years that men have resorted to 
the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts; the New 
Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the 
Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry 
Gill, in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant, 
the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few 
sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. 
Neither could I do without them. 

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affec- 
tion. I loved to have mine before my window, and the 
more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. 
I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by 
spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I 
played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean- 



206 WALDEN. 

field. As my driver prophesied when I was ploughing, 
they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, 
and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could 
give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get 
the village blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped him, 
and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made 
it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true. 

A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is in- 
teresting to remember how much of this food for fire is 
still concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous 
years I had often gone " prospecting " over some bare hill 
side, where a pitch-pine wood hacl formerly stood, and 
got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. 
Stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be 
sound at the core, thqugh the sapwood has all become 
vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick 
bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches 
distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore 
this mine, and follow the marrow}'' store, yellow as beef 
tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into 
the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry 
leaves of the forest, which I had stoi'cd up in my shed be- 
fore the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the 
wood-chopper's kindlings, when he has a camp in the 
woods. Once in a while I got a little of this. When the 
villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too 
gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, 
by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that I was 
awake. — 

Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird, 
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight, 
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn, 
CircHng above the hamlets as thy nest; 
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form 
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts; 
By night star-veiling, and by day 
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun; 
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth, 
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame. 

Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of 
that, answered my purpose better than any other. I 
sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a 



HOUSE-WARMING. 207 

winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four hours 
afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house 
was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left 
a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that 
lived there; and commonly my housekeeper proved trust- 
worth}'. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I 
thought that I would just look in at the window and see if 
the house was not on fire; it was the only time I remember 
to have been particularly anxious on this score ; so I looked 
and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in 
and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as 
my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered 
a position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford to 
let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day. 
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third po- 
tato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left 
after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest 
animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they 
survive the winter only because they are so careful to se- 
cure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming 
to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal 
merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a 
sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up 
some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead 
of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can 
move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, main- 
tain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means 
of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen 
out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, 
and saves a little time for the fine arts. Though, when I 
had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my 
whole body began to grow torpid, wdien I reached the 
genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my fac- 
ulties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously 
housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we 
trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be 
at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads 
any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We 
go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a 
little colder Friday, or greater snow, would put a period to 
man's existence on the globe. 



208 WALDEN. 

The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for econ- 
omy, since I did not own the forest ; but it did not keep fire 
so well as the open fire-place. Cooking was then, for the 
most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. 
It will soon be forgotten^ in these days of stoves, that we 
used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fash- 
ion. The stove not only took up room and scented the 
house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a 
companion. You can always see a face in the fire. The 
laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of 
the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated 
during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into 
the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me 
with new force. — 

"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me 
Tliy dear, life imaging, close sj^mpathy. 
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright? 
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night? 

" Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, 
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all? 
Was thj' existence then too fanciful 
For our life's common light, who are so dull? 
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold 
With our congenial souls? secrets too bold? 
Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit 
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit, 
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire 
Warms feet and hands — nor does to more aspire; 
By whose compact utilitarian heap 
Tlie present may sit down and go to sleep. 
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked. 
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked." 



XIV. 

FORMER inhabitants; AND WINTER VISITORS. 

I WEATHERED somc merry snow-storms, and spent some 
cheerful winter evenings by my fire-side, while the snow 
whirled wildly without, and even the hooting of the owl 
was hushed. For many Aveeks I met no one in my walks 
but those who came occasionally to cut wood and sled it to 



FORMER INHABITANTS. 209 

the village. The elements, however, abetted me in mak- 
ing a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for 
when I had once gone through the wind blew the oalc 
leaves into my tracks, where they lodged, and by absor!:)- 
ing the rays of the sun melted the snow, and so not only 
made a dry bed for my feet, but in the night their dark 
line was my guide. For human society I was obliged to 
conjure up the former occupants of these woods. Within 
the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which 
my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of 
inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched 
and dotted here and there with their little gardens and 
dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the 
forest than now. In some places, within my own remem- 
brance, the pines would scrape both sides of a chaise at 
once, and women and children who were compelled to go 
this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it with fear, and 
often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly but 
a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the wood- 
man's team, it once amused the traveller more than now 
by its variety, and lingered longer in his memory. Where 
now firm open fields stretch from the village to the woods, 
it then ran through a maple swamp on a foundation of 
logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still underlie the 
present dusty highway, from the Stratton, now the Alms 
House, Farm, to Brister's Hill. 

East of my beanfield, across the road, lived Cato In- 
graham, slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman 
of Concord village; who built his slave a house, and gave 
him permission to live in Walden Woods; — Cato, not 
Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say that he was a 
Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little 
patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he 
should be old and need them; but a younger and whiter 
speculator got them at last. He too, however, occupies an 
equally narrow house at present. Cato's half-obliterated 
cellar hole still remains, though known to few, being con- 
cealed from the traveller b}^ a fringe of pines. It is now 
filled with the smooth sumach (Rhus glabra), and one of 
the earliest species of goldenrod {SoUdago strida) grows 
there luxuriantly. 



210 WALDEN. 

Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to 
town, Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where 
she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden 
Woods ring with her shrill singing, for she had a loud and 
notable voice. At length, in the war of 1812, her dwelling 
was set on fire by English soldiers, prisoners on parole, 
when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens were all 
burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat 
inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers 
that as he passed her house one noon he heard her mutter- 
ing to herself over her gurgling pot, — "Ye are all bones, 
bones ! " I have seen bricks amid the oak copse there. 

Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill, 
lived Brister Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire 
Cummings once, — there where grow still the apple trees 
which Brister planted and tended ; large old trees now, but 
their fruit still wild and ciderish to my taste. Not long 
since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln bur3-ing-ground, 
a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some 
British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord, — 
where he is styled " Sippio Brister," — Scipio Africanus he 
had some title to be called, — "a man of color," as if he 
were discolored. It also told me, with staring emphasis, 
when he died ; which was but an indirect way of informing 
me that he ever lived. With him dwelt Fenda, his hos- 
pitable wife, wdio told fortunes, yet pleasantly, — large, 
'round, and black, blacker than any of the children of 
night, such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or 
since. 

Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the 
woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton 
family; whose orchard once covered all the slope of Bris- 
ter's Hill, but was long since killed out by pitch-pines, ex- 
cepting a few stumps, whose old roots furnish still the 
wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree. 

Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's location, on 
the other side of the way, just on the edge of the Avood; 
ground famous for the pranks of a demon not distinctly 
named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and 
astounding part in our New England life, and deserves, as 
much as any mythological character, to have his biog- 



FORMER INHABITANTS. 211 

raphy written one day; who first comes in the guise of a 
friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole 
family, — New England Rum. But history must not yet 
tell the tragedies enacted here; let time intervene in some 
measure to assuage and lend an azure tint to them. Here 
the most indistinct and dubious tradition says that once a 
tavern stood ; the well the same, which tempered the trav- 
eller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here then men 
saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and 
went their ways again. 

Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though 
it had long been unoccupied. It was about the size of 
mine. It was set on fire by mischievous boys, one Elec- 
tion night, if I do not mistake. I lived on the edge of the 
village then, and had just lost myself over Davenant's 
Gondibert, that winter that I labored with a lethargy, — 
which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a 
family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shav- 
ing himself, and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar 
Sundays, in order to keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or 
as the consequence of my attempt to read Chalmers' col- 
lection of English poetry wdthout skipping. It fairly over- 
came my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when 
the bells rang fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that 
way, led by a straggling troop of men and boys, and I 
among the foi'emost, for I had leaped the brook. We 
thought it was far south over the woods, — we who had run 
to fires before, — barn, shop, or dwelling-house, or all to- 
gether. "It's Baker's barn," cried one. "It is the Cod- 
man Place," affirmed another. And then fresh sparks 
went up above the wood, as if the roof fell in, and w"e all 
shouted " Concord to the rescue ! " Wagons shot past with 
furious speed and crushing loads, bearing, perchance, 
among the rest, the agent of the Insurance Company, who 
was bound to go however far; and ever and anon the 
engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure, and rear- 
most of all, as it was afterward whispered, came they who 
set the fire and gave the alarm. Thus we kept on like true 
idealists, rejecting the evidence of our senses, until at a 
turn in the road we heard the crackling and actually felt 
the heat of the fire from over the wall, and realized, alas I 



212 WALDEN. 

that we were there. The very nearness of the fire but 
cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frog- 
pond on to it; but concluded to let it burn, it was so far 
gone and so worthless. So we stood round our engine, 
jostled one another, expressed our sentiments through 
speaking trumpets, or in lower tone referred to the great 
conflagrations which the world has witnessed, including 
Bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that, 
were we there in season with our "tub" and a full frog- 
pond by, we could turn that threatened last and universal 
one into another flood. We finally retreated without do- 
ing any mischief, — returned to sleep and Gondibert. But 
as for Gondibert, I would except that passage in the pref- 
ace about wit being the soul's powder, — " but most of man- 
kind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to powder." 

It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the 
following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low 
moaning at this spot, I drew near in the dark, and dis- 
covered the only survivor of the family that I know, the 
heir of both its virtues and its vices, who alone was in- 
terested in this burning, lying on his stomach and looking 
over the cellar wall at the still smouldering cinders be- 
neath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been 
working far off in the river meadow all daj' , and had im- 
proved the first moments that he could call his own to 
visit the home of his fathers and his youth. He gazed into 
the cellar from all sides and points of view by turns, always 
lying down to it, as if there was some treasure, which he 
remembered, concealed between the stones, where there 
was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes. 
The house being gone, he looked at what there was left. 
He was soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence 
implied, and showed me, as well as the darkness per- 
mitted, where the well was covered up; which, thank 
Heaven, could never be burned ; and he groped long about 
the wall to find the well-sweep which his father had cut and 
mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a 
burden had been fastened to the heavy end, — all that he 
could now cling to, — to convince me that it was no com- 
mon "rider." I felt it, and still remark it almost daily in 
my walks, for by it hangs the history of a family. 



FORMER INHABITANTS. 213 

Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and 
lilac bushes b}' the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutt- 
ing and Le Grosse. But to return toward Lincoln. 

Farther in the woods than any of these, where the 
road approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter 
squatted, and furnished his townsmen with earthen ware, 
and left descendants to succeed him. Neither were they 
rich in worldly goods, holding the land by sufferance 
Avhilc they lived; and there often the sheriff came in vain 
to collect the taxes, and "attached a chip," for form's 
sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing 
else that he could lay his hands on. One day in mid- 
summer, when I was hoeing, a man who was carrying a 
load of pottery to market stopped his horse against my 
field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He 
had long ago bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished 
to know what had become of him. I had read of the 
potter's clay and wheel in Scripture, but it had never 
occurred to me that the pots we use were not such as had 
come down unbroken from those days, or grown on trees 
like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so 
fictile an art was ever practised in my neighborhood. 

The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an 
Irishman, Hugh Quoil (if I have spelt his name with coil 
enough), who occupied Wyman's tenement, — Col. Quoil, 
he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at 
Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight 
his battles over again. His trade here was that of a 
ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to 
Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a 
man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and 
was capable of moi'e civil speech than you could well 
attend to. He wore a great coat in midsummer, being 
affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the 
color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of 
Brister's Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that 
I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his 
house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as 
'' an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his old clothes 
curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised 
plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead 



214 WALDEN. 

of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never 
have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me 
that, though he had heard of Brister's Spring, he had 
never seen it ; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds, spades, 
and hearts, wei'e scattered over the floor. One black 
chicken which the administrator could not catch, black 
as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Rey- 
nard, still went to roost in the next apartment. In the 
rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had 
been planted but had never received its first hoeing, ow- 
ing to those terrible shaking fits, though it was now 
harvest time. It was overrun with Roman wormwood 
and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all 
fruit. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched 
upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; 
but no warm cap or mittens would he want more. 

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these 
dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, 
raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel bushes, and sumachs 
growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch-pine or 
gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a 
sweet-scented black-birch, perhaps, waves where the 
door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where 
once a spring oozed ; now dry and tearless grass ; or it was 
covered deep, — not to be discovered till some late day, — ■■ 
with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race 
departed. What a sorrowful act must that be, — the 
covering up of wells ! coincident with the opening of wells 
of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, 
old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and 
bustle of human life, and " fate, free-will, foreknowledge . 
absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by 
turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions 
amounts to just this, that "Cato and Brister pulled 
wool ; " which is about as edifying as the history of more 
famous schools of philosophy. 

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the 
door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet- 
scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing 
traveller; planted and tended once b}^ children's hands, 
in front-yard plots, — now standing by wall-sides in retired 



WINTER VISITORS. 215 

pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests; — the 
last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did 
the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two 
eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow 
of the house and daily watei'ed, would root itself so, and 
outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, 
and grow man's garden and orchard, and tell their story 
faintly to the lone wanderer a half century after they had 
grown up and died, — blossoming as fair, and smelling as 
sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil 
cheerful, lilac colors. 

But this small village, germ of something more, why 
did it fail while Concord keeps its ground? Were there 
no natural advantages, — no water privileges, forsooth? 
Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool Brister's Spring, — 
privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at these, all 
unimproved by these men but to clilute their glass. They 
were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket, 
stable-broom, mat-making, corn-parching, linen-spinning, 
and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilder- 
ness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity 
have inherited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil 
would at least have been proof against a low-land de- 
generacy. Alas! how little does the memory of these hu- 
man inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! 
Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler, 
and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in the 
hamlet. 

I am not aware that any man has ever built on the 
spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on 
the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, 
whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and ac- 
cursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth 
itself will be destroyed. With such reminiscences I re- 
peopled the woods and lulled myself asleep. 

At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow 
lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a 
week or a fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snug as 
a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said 
to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even 



216 WALDEN. 

without food; or like that early settler's famil}' in the 
town of Sutton, in this state, whose cottage was com- 
pletely covered by the great snow of 1717 when he was 
absent, and an Indian found it only by the hole which 
the chimne3''s breath made in the drift, and so relieved 
the family. But no friendly Indian concerned himself 
about me ; nor needed he, for the master of the house was 
at home. The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear 
of! When the farmers could not get to the woods and 
swamps with their teams, and were obliged to cut down 
the shade trees before their houses, and when the crust 
was harder cut off the trees in the swamps ten feet from 
the ground, as it appeared the next spring. 

In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the 
highway to my house, about half a mile long, might have 
been represented by a meandering dotted line, with wide 
intervals between the dots. For a week of even weather 
I took exactly the same number of steps, and of the same 
length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with 
the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks, — 
to such routine the winter reduces us,— yet often they 
were filled with heaven's own blue. But no weather 
interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going 
abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles, 
through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with 
a beech tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance 
among the pines; when the ice and snow, causing their 
limbs to droop, and so sharpening their tops, had changed 
the pines into fir trees; wading to the tops of the highest 
hills when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level, 
and shaking down another snow-storm on my head at 
every step ; or sometimes creeping and floundering thither 
on my hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into 
winter quarters. One afternoon I amused myself by 
watching a barrel owl {Strix nebulosa) sitting on one of 
the lower dead limbs cT a white-pine, close to the trunk, 
in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He 
could hear me when I moved and crouched the snow with 
my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made 
noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck 
feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell 



WINTER VISITORS. 217 

again, and he began to nod. I too felt a slumberous 
influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus 
with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the 
cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, 
by which he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus 
with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, 
and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that 
interrupted his visions. At length, on some louder noise 
or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and slug- 
gishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having 
his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off 
and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to 
unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound 
from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather 
by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, 
feeling his twilight way as it were with his sensitive pin- 
ions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace 
await the dawning of his day. 

As I walked over the long causeway made for the rail- 
road through the meadows, I encountered many a blus- 
tering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; 
and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen 
as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it much 
better by the carriage road from Brister's Hill. For I 
came to town still, like a friendly Indian, when the con- 
tents of the broad open fields were all piled up between 
the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed 
to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when 
I returned new drifts would have formed through w^hich 
I floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been 
depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the 
road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the 
small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I 
rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm and 
springy swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage 
still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier 
bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. 

Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, wdien I re- 
turned from my walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks 
of a woodchopper leading from my door, and found his 
pile '■ " whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with 



218 WALDEN. 

the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I 
chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow 
made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far 
through the woods sought my house, to have a social 
"crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are '"men 
on their farms " ; who donned a frock instead of a pro- 
fessor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of 
church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn- 
yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat 
about large fires in cold bracing weather, with clear heads; 
and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many 
a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, 
for those which have the thickest shells are commonly 
empty. 

The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through 
deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A 
farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, 
rasij be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is 
actuated by pure love. Who can predict his comings and 
goings? His business calls him out of all hours, even, 
when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with 
boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much 
sober talk, making amends then to Waldcn vale for the 
long silences. Broadway was still and deserted in com- 
parison. At suitable intervals there were regular salutes 
of laughter, which might have been referred indifferently 
to the last-uttered or the forthcoming jest. We made 
many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dish of 
gruel, which combined the advantages of conviviality 
with the clear-headedness which philosophy requires. 

I should not forget that during my last winter at the 
pond there was another welcome visitor, who at one time 
came through the village, through snow and rain and 
darkness, till he saw my lamp through the trees, and 
shared with me some long winter evenings. One of the 
last of the philosophers, — Connecticut gave him to the 
world, — he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he de- 
clares, his brains. These he peddles still, prompting God 
and disgracing man, bearing for fruit his brain only, like 
the nut its kernel. I think that he must be the man of the 
most faith of any alive. His words and attitude always 



WINTER VISITORS. 219 

suppose a better state of things than other men are ac- 
quainted with, and he will be the last man to be disap- 
pointed as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the 
present. But though comparatively disregarded now, 
when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take 
effect, and masters of families and rulers will come to 
him for advice. — 

"How blind that cannot see serenity! " 

A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human 
progress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, 
with unwearied patience and faith making plain the 
image engraven in men's bodies, the God of whom they 
are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his hos- 
pitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, 
and scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to 
it commonly some breadth and elegance. I think that 
he should keep a caravansary on the world's highway, 
where philosophers of all nations might put up, and on 
his sign should be printed: "Entertainment for man, but 
not for his beast. Enter ye that have leisure and a quiet 
mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He is perhaps 
the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I 
chance to know; the same yesterday and to-morrow. Of 
yore we had sauntered and talked, and effectually put 
the world behind us; for he was pledged to no institution 
in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever way we turned, it 
seemed that the heavens and the earth had met together, 
since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A blue- 
robed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky 
Avhich reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever 
die; Nature cannot spare him. 

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we 
sat and whittled them., trying our knives, and admiring 
the clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. We 
waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so 
smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared from 
the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came 
and went grandly, like the clouds which float through 
the western sky, and the mother-o'-pearl flocks wdiich 
sometimes form and dissolve there. There we worked, 



220 WALDEN. 

revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and 
building castles in the air for which earth offered no 
worthy foundation. Great Looker! Great Expecter! 
to converse with whom was a New England Night's 
Entertainment. Ah! such discourse we had, hermit and 
philosopher, and the old settler I have spoken of, — we 
three, — it expanded and racked my little house; I should 
not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was above 
the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it 
opened its seams so that they had to be calked with much 
dulness thereafter to stop the consequent leak; — but I 
had enough of that kind of oakum already picked. 

There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," 
long to be remembered, at his house in the village, and 
who looked in upon me from time to time; but I had no 
more for society there. 

There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the 
Visitor who never comes. The Vishnu Purana says,. 
''The house-holder is to remain at eventide in his court- 
yard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or longer if he 
pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often per- 
formed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to 
milk a whole herd of cows, but did not see the man ap- 
proaching from the town. 



XV. 

WINTER ANIMALS. 

When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not 
only new ancl shorter routes to man}^ points, but new 
views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around 
them. When I crossed Flint's Pond, after it was covered 
with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated 
over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that 
I could think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln 
hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, 
in which I did not remember to have stood before; and 
the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, 
moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for 



WINTER ANIMALS. 221 

sealers or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like 
fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they 
were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I w'ent 
to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road 
and passing no house between my own hut and the lecture 
room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of 
muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the 
ice, though none could be seen abroad w'hen I crossed it. 
Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with 
only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard, 
where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two 
feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were con- 
fined to their streets. There, far from the village street, 
and, except at very long intervals, from the jingle of 
sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard 
well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines 
bent down with snow or l^ristling with icicles. 

For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, 
I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl 
indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would 
yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua 
vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at 
last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. 
I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without 
hearing it ; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, 
and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how 
der do; or sometimes hoo hoo only. One night in the begin- 
ning of winter, before the pond froze over, about nine 
o'clock, I was startled by the loud honking of a goose, 
and, stepping to the door, heard the sound of their wings 
like a tempest in the woods, as they flew low over my 
house. They passed over the pond toward Fair-Haven, 
seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their 
commodore honking all the while with a regular beat. 
Suddenly an unmistakable cat-owl from very near me, 
with the most harsh and tremendous voice I ever heard 
from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular 
intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and 
disgrace this intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting 
a greater compass and volume of voice in a native, and 
boo-hoo him out of Concord horizon. What do you mean 



222 WALDEN. 

by alarming the citadel at this time of night consecrated 
to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such 
an hour, and that I have not got lungs and a lar^^nx as 
well as yourself? Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo! It was one 
of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if 
you had a disci'iminating ear, there were in it the ele- 
ments of a concord such as these plains never saw nor 
heard. 

I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my 
great bed-fellows in that part of Concord, as if it were 
restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled 
with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the 
cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had 
driven a team against my door, and in the morning would 
find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a 
third of an inch wide. 

Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the 
snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge 
or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like 
forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking 
expression, struggling for light and to be clogs outright 
and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into 
our account, may there not be a civilization going on 
among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me to be 
rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their de- 
fence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came 
near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vul- 
pine curse at me, and then retreated. 

Usually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked 
me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down 
the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this 
purpose. In the course of the winter I threw out half a 
bushel of ears of sweet-corn, which had not got ripe, on 
to the snow crust by m}^ door, and was amused by watch- 
ing the motions of the various animals which were baited 
by it. In the twilight and the night the rabbits came 
regularly and made a hearty meal. All day long the red 
squirrels came and went, and afforded me much enter- 
tainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at 
first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the 
snow crust by fits and starts hke a leaf blown by the 



WINTER ANIMALS. 223 

wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed 
and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with 
his "trotters," as if it M^ere for a wager, and now as many 
paces that way, but never getting on more than half a 
rod at a time ; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous 
expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes 
in the universe were fixed on him, — for all the motions 
of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the 
forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing- 
girl, — wasting more time in delay and circumspection 
than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance, — 
I never saw one walk, — and then suddenly, before you 
could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a 
young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all 
imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the 
universe at the same time, — for no reason that I could 
ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At 
length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable 
ear, brisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical 
way to the top most stick of my wood-pile, before my 
window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for 
hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to 
time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half- 
naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still 
and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the 
kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the 
stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell 
to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludi- 
crous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it 
had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, 
or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listen- 
ing to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent 
fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at 
last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably 
bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would 
set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by 
the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratching 
along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling 
all the Avhile, making its fall a diagonal between a per- 
pendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it 
through at any rate; — a singularly frivolous and whim- 



224 WALDEN. 

sical fellow; — and so he would get off with it to where he 
lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or 
fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs 
strewed about the woods in various directions. 

At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams 
were heard long before, as they were warily making their 
approach an eighth of a mile off; and in a stealthy and 
sneaking manner they flit from tree to tree, nearer and 
nearer, and pick up the kernels which the squirrels have 
dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch-pine bough, they 
attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too 
'^ig for their throats and chokes them; and after great 
.abor they disgorge it, and spend an hour in the endeavor 
to crack it by repeated blows with their bills. They were 
manifestly thieves, and I had not much respect for them; 
but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to work as if 
they were taking what was their own. 

Meanwhile also came the chickadees r.i flocks, which, 
picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew 
to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, 
hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it 
were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently re- 
duced for their slender throats. A little flock of these 
titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my wood-pile, 
or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, 
like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly 
day day day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry 
summery phe-be from the wood-side. They were so fa- 
miliar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood 
which I was carrying in, and pecked at the sticks with- 
out fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder 
for a moment Avhile I was hoeing in a village garden, and 
I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance 
than I should have been by any epaulet I could have 
worn. The squirrels also grew at last to be quite familiar, 
and occasionally stepped ui3on my shoe, when that was 
the nearest way. 

When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again 
near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my 
south hill side and about my wood-pile, the partridges 
came out of the woods mornino; and evening; to feed there. 



WINTER ANIMALS. 225 

Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge 
bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from 
the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting 
down in the sunbeams like golden dust; for this brave 
bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently cov- 
ered up by drifts, and, it is said, "sometimes plunges 
from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains con- 
cealed for a day or two." I used to start them in the 
open land also, where they had come out of the woods at 
sunset to "bud" the wild apple trees. They will come 
regularly every evening to particular trees, where the 
cunning sportsman lies in wait for them, and the distant 
orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. I am 
glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Na- 
ture's own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink. 

In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, 
I sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the 
woods with hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the 
instinct of the chase, and the note of the hunting horn 
at intervals, proving that man was in the rear. The 
woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on to the 
open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their 
Actseon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters re- 
turning with a single brush trailing from their sleigh for 
a troplw, seeking their inn. They tell me that if the fox 
would remain in the bosom of the frozen earth he would 
be safe, or if he would run in a straight line away no fox- 
hound could overtake him; but, having left his pursuers 
far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, 
and when he runs he circles round to his old haunts, 
where the hunters await him. Sometimes, however, he 
will run upon a wall many rods, and then leap off far to 
one side, and he appears to know that water will not 
retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a 
fox pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when 
the ice was covered w^ith shallow puddles, run part way 
across, and then return to the same shore. Erelong the 
hounds arrived, but here they lost the scent. Sometimes 
a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door, and 
circle round my house, and j^elp and hound without re- 
garding me^ as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that 



226 WALDEN. 

nothing could divert them from the pursuit. Thus they 
circle until they fall upon the recent trail of a fox, for a 
wise hound will forsake everything else for this. One 
day a man came to my hut from Lexington to inquire 
after his hound that made a large track, and had been 
hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was 
not the wiser for all I told him, for every time I attempted 
to answer his questions he interrupted me by asking, 
"What do you clo here?" He had lost a dog, but found 
a man. 

One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to 
come to bathe in Walden once every year when the 
water was warmest, and at such times looked in upon me, 
told me that many years ago he took his gun one after- 
noon and went out for a cruise in Walden ^^'ood, and as 
he walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds 
approaching, and erelong a fox leaped the wall into the 
road, and as quick as thought leaped the other wall out 
of the road, and his swift bullet had not touched him. 
Some way behind came an old hound and her three pups 
in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and disap- 
peared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he 
was resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard 
the voice of the hounds far over toward Fair-Haven still 
pursuing the fox; and on they came, their hounding cry 
which made all the woods ring sounding nearer and 
nearer, now from Well-Meadow, now from the Baker 
Farm. For a long time he stood still and listened to their 
music, so sweet to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox 
appeared, threading the solemn aisles with an easy cours- 
ing pace, whose sound was concealed by a sympathetic 
rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the ground, 
leaving his pursuers far behind; and, leaping upon a rock 
amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back 
to the hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the 
latter's arm; but that was a short-lived mood, and as 
quick as thought can follow thought his piece was levelled, 
and whang! — the fox rolling over the rock lay dead on 
the ground. The hunter still kept his place and listened 
to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near 
Avoods resounded throu";h all their aisles with their de- 



WINTER ANIMALS. 227 

moniac cry. At length the old hound burst into view 
with muzzle to the ground, and snapping the air as if 
possessed, and ran directly to the rock; but spying the 
dead fox she suddenly ceased her hounding, as if struck 
dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him 
in silence; and one by one her pups arrived, and, like 
their mother, were sobered into silence by the mystery. 
Then the hunter came forward and stood in their midst, 
and the mystery was solved. They waited in silence 
while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush awhile, 
and at length turned off into the woods again. That 
evening a Weston Squire came to the Concord hunter's 
cottage to inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week 
they had been hunting on their own account from Wes- 
ton woods. The Concord hunter told him what he knew 
and offered him the skin; but the other declined it and 
departed. He did not find his hounds that night, but the 
next day learned that they had crossed the river and put 
up at a farm-house for the night, whence, having been 
well fed, they took their departure early in the morning. 
The hunter who told me this could remember one 
Sam Nutting, who used to hunt bears on Fair-Haven 
Ledges, and exchange their skins for rum in Concord 
village; who told him, even, that he had seen a moose 
there. Xutting had a famous fox-hound named Bur- 
goyne, — he pronounced it Bugine, — which my informant 
used to borrow. In the "Wast Book" of an old trader 
of this town, who was also a captain, town-clerk, and 
representative, I find the following entry: Jan. ISth, 
1742-3, "John Mclven Cr. by 1 Grey Fox 0—2—3;" they 
are not found here; and in his ledger, Feb. 7th, 1743, 
Hezekiah Stratton has credit " by ^ a Catt skin — 1 — 4^ ; " 
of course a wild-cat, for Stratton was a sergeant in the 
old French war, and would not have got credit for hunt- 
ing less noble game.- Credit is given for deerskins also, 
and they were daily sold. One man still preserves the 
horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and 
another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which 
his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a 
numerous and merry crew here. I remember well one 
gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by the road- 



228 WALDEN. 

side and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, 
if my memory serves me, than any hunting horn. 

At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met 
with hounds in my path prowling about the woods, 
which would skulk out of my way, as if afraid, and stand 
silent amid the bushes till I had passed. 

Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. 
There were scores of pitch-pines around my house, from 
one to four inches in diameter, which had been gnawed 
by mice the previous winter, — a Norwegian ^^'inter for 
them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they were 
obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their 
other diet. These trees were alive and apparently flour- 
ishing at mid-summer, and many of them had grown a 
foot, though completely girdled; but after another winter 
such were without exception dead. It is remarkable that 
a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole pine tree 
for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it; 
but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, 
which are wont to grow up densely. 

The hares {Lepus Americanus) were very familiar. 
One had her form under my house all winter, separated 
from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each 
morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir, — 
thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor 
timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door 
at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown 
out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they 
could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in 
the twilight I alternately lost and recovered sight of one 
sitting motionless under my window. When I opened 
my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak 
and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity. 
One evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at 
first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor 
wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears and sharp 
nose, scant tail and slender paws. It looked as if Nature 
no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods, but stood 
on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared 3'oung and un- 
healthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it 
scudded with an elastic spring over the snow crust, 



THE POND IN WINTER. 229 

straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, 
and soon put the forest between me and itself, — the wild 
free venison, asserting its vigor and the dignity of Nature, 
Not without reason was its slenderness. Such then was 
its nature. (Lepus, levipes, lightfoot, some think.) 

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? 
They are among the most simple and indigenous animal 
products; ancient and venerable families known to antiq- 
uity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance 
of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground, — and 
to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is 
hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a 
partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be 
exJDected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit 
are still sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever 
revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and 
bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they 
become more numerous than ever. That must be a poor 
country indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods 
teem with them both, and around every swamp may be 
seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences 
and horse-hair snares, which some cow-boy tends. 



XVI. 

THE POND IN WINTER. 

After a still winter night I awoke with the impression 
that some question had been put to me, which I had been 
endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what — 
how — when — where? But there was dawning Nature, in 
whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows 
with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. 
I awoke to an answered ciuestion, to Nature and daylight. 
The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, 
and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, 
seemed to say. Forward! Nature puts no question and 
answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago 
taken her resolution. "O Prince, our eyes contemplate 
wath admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful 



230 WALDEN. 

and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils 
without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day 
comes to reveal to us this great work, which extends from 
earth even into the plains of the ether." 

Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and 
pail and go in search of water; if that be not a dream. 
After a cold and snowy night it needed a divining rod to 
find it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of 
the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and re- 
flected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth 
of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the 
heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an 
equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from any 
level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it 
closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months 
or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a 
pasture amid the hills, I cut my wa}^ first through a foot 
of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under 
my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the 
quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as 
through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded 
floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless 
serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, correspond- 
ing to the cool and even temperament of the inhab- 
itants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our 
heads. 

Early in the morning, Avhile all things are crisp with 
frost, men come with fishing reels and slender lunch, and 
let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take 
pickerel and perch; wild men, who instinctively follow 
other fashions and trust other authorities than their 
townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns 
together in parts where else they would be ripped. They 
sit and cat their luncheon in stout fear-naughts on the dry 
oak leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citi- 
zen is in artificial. They never consulted with books, and 
know and can tell much less than they have done. The 
things which they practise are said not yet to be known. 
Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch for bait. 
You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond, 
as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where 



THE POND IN WINTER. 231 

she had retreated. How, pray, did he get these in mid- 
Avinter? Oh, he got worms out of rotten logs since the 
ground froze, and so he caught them. His hfe itself passes 
deeper in Nature than the studies of the naturalist pene- 
trate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter 
raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of 
insects ; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, 
and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by 
barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I 
love to see Nature carried out in him. The perch swallows 
the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the 
fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in 
the scale of being are filled. 

When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was 
sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some 
ruder fisherman had adopted. He would perhaps have 
placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice, 
which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance 
from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to 
a stick to prevent its being pulled through, have passed 
the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above 
the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to it, which, being pulled 
down, would show when he had a bite. These alders 
loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked 
halfway round the pond. 

Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on 
the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, 
making a little hole to admit the water, I am always sur- 
prised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, 
they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, for- 
eign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite 
dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them 
by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock 
whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not 
green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like 
the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer 
colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the 
pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden 
water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all 
through; are themselves small W^aldens in the animal 
kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught 



232 WALDEN. 

here, — that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath 
the ratthng teams and chaises and tinkhng sleighs that 
travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish 
swims. I never chanced to see its kind in an}' market; it 
would be the cynosure of all eyes there. Easily, with a 
few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery ghosts, 
like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of 
heaven. 

As I was desirous to recover the long-lost bottom of 
Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke 
up, early in '46, with compass and chain and sounding 
line. There have been many stories told about the bottom, 
or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no 
foundation for themselves. It is remarkable how long- 
men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without 
taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such 
Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. 
Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to 
the other side of the globe. Some who have lain flat on 
the ice for a long time, looking down through the illusive 
medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain, and 
driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in 
their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which a load of 
hay might be driven," if there were anybody to drive it, 
the undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the In- 
fernal Regions from these parts. Others have gone down 
from the village with a "fifty-six" and a wagon load of 
inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom; for 
while the "fifty-six" was resting by the way, they were 
paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their 
truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I 
can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight 
bottom at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual, 
depth. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone 
Aveighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accu- 
rately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so 
much harder before the water got underneath to help me. 
The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; 
to which may be added the five feet which it has risen 
since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remark- 



THE POND IN WINTER. 233 

able aepth for so small an aroa; yet not an inch of it can be 
spared by the imagination. What if all ponds Avere shal- 
low? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am 
thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a 
symbol. While men believe in the infinite some ponds 
will be thought to be bottomless. 

A factory owner, hearing what depth I had found, 
thought that it could not be true, for, judging from his ac- 
quaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an 
angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep in propor- 
tion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would 
not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups 
between the hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep 
for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre 
not deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, 
would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently 
see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that re- 
lates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the 
head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as "a 
bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four 
miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded 
by mountains, observes, " If we could have seen it im- 
mediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convul- 
sion of Nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, 
what a horrid chasm it must have appeared!" 

"So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low 
Down sunk a hollow bottom, broad, and deep, 
Capacious bed of waters " 

But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply 
these proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, ap- 
pears already in a vertical section only like a shallow plate, 
it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the in- 
creased horrors of the chasm of Loch Yyne when emptied. 
No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching corn- 
fields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from which 
the waters have receded, though it requires the insight 
and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsus- 
pecting inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye. 
may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low ho- 
rizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have 



234 WALDEX. 

been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, 
as they who work on the highways know, to find the hol- 
lows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, 
the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and 
soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of 
the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable com- 
pared with its breadth. 

As I sounded through the ice I could determine the 
shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible 
in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was 
surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part 
there are several acres more level than almost any field 
which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plough. In one in- 
stance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary 
more than one foot in thirty rods ; and generally, near the 
middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hun- 
dred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four 
inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dan- 
gerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the 
effect of water under these circumstances is to level all in- 
equalities. The regularity of the bottom and its con- 
formity to the shores and the range of the neighboring 
hills were so perfect that p. distant promontory betrayed 
itself in the soundings quite across the pond, and its di- 
rection could be determined by observing the opposite 
shore.. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and 
gorge deep water and channel. 

When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods 
to an inch, and put clown the soundings, more than a hun- 
dred in all, I observed this remarkable coincidence. Hav- 
ing noticed that the number ijidicating the greatest depth 
was apparently in the centre of the map, I laid a rule on 
the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to 
my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected 
the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest 
depth, notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, 
the outline of the pond far from regular, and the extreme 
length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves; 
and I said to myself. Who knows but this hint would con- 
duct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as of a pond or 
puddle? Is not this the rule also for the height of moun- 



THE POND IN WINTER. 235 

tains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? We know that 
a hill is not highest at its narrowest part. 

Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were 
obse ved to have a bar quite across their mouths and 
deeper water within, so that the bay tended to be an ex- 
pansion of water within the land not onl_v horizontally but 
vertically, and to form a basin or independent pond, the 
direction of the tAvo capes showing the course of the bar. 
Every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar at its en- 
trance. In proportion as the mouth of the cove was w'ider 
compared with its length, the water over the bar was 
deeper compared with that in the basin. Given, then, the 
length and breadth of the cove, and the character of the 
surrounding shore, and you have almost elements enough 
to make out a formula for all cases. 

In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this ex- 
perience, at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the 
outlines of its surface and the character of its shores alone, 
I made a plan of White Pond, which contains about forty- 
one acres, and, like this, has no island in it, nor any visible 
inlet or outlet ; and as the line of greatest breadth fell very 
near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes ap- 
proached each other and two opposite bays receded, I 
ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter 
line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. 
The deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet 
of this, still farther in the direction to which I had in- 
clined, and was only one foot deeper, namely sixty feet. 
Of course, a stream running through, or an island in the 
pond, would make the problem much more complicated. 

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only 
one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, 
to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we 
know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of 
course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but 
by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. 
Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to 
those instances which we detect; but the harmony which 
results from a far greater number of seemingly conflict- 
ing, but really concurring, laws, which we have not de- 
tected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are 



236 WALDEN. 

as our points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain out- 
line varies with every step, and it has an infinite number 
of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when 
cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its en- 
tireness. 

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in 
ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule of the two 
diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the sys- 
tem and the heart in man; but draw lines through the 
length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular 
daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, 
and where they intersect will be the height or depth of 
his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his 
shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, 
to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is sur- 
rounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean 
shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his 
bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But 
a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. 
In our bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and 
indicates a corresponding depth of thought. Also there is 
a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular 
inclination; each is our harbor for a season, in which we 
are detained and partially land-locked. These inclina- 
tions are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and 
direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, 
the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradu- 
ally increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a 
subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, 
that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in 
which a thought was harbored becomes an individual 
lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures 
its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, 
becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the ad- 
vent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose 
that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It 
is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, 
for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless 
coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of 
poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into 
the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this 



THE POND IN WINTER, 237 

world, and no natural currents concur to individualize 
them. 

As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not dis- 
covered any but rain and snow and evaporation, though 
perhaps, with a thermometer and a line, such places may 
be found, for where the water flows into the pond it will 
probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. 
When the ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes 
sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were 
stacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie 
side by side with the rest ; and the cutters thus discovered 
that the ice over a small space was two or three inches 
thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there 
was an inlet there. They also showed me in another place 
what they thought was a " leach hole," through which the 
pond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, 
pushing me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small 
cavity under ten feet of water; but I think that I can war- 
rant the pond not to need soldering till they find a worse 
leak than that. One has suggestecl that if such a ''leach 
hole," should be found, its connection with the meadow, 
if any existed, might be proved by conveying some col- 
ored powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then 
putting a strainer over the spring in the meadow, which 
would catch some of the particles carried through by the 
current. 

While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen 
inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water. 
It is well known that a level cannot be used on ice. At 
one rod from the shore its greatest fluctuation, when 
observed by means of a level on land directed toward a 
graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch, 
though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. 
It was probably greater in the middle. Who knows but 
if our instruments were delicate enough we might detect 
an undulation in the crust of the earth? When two legs 
of my level were on the shore and the third on the ice, 
and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall 
of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a differ- 
ence of several feet on a tree across the pond. When I 
began to cut holes for sounding, there were three or four 



238 WALDEX. 

inches of water on the ice under a deep snow which had 
sunk it thus far; but the water began immediately to run 
into these holes, and continued to run for two days in 
deep streams, which wore away the ice on every side, and 
contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface 
of the pond; for, as the Avater ran in, it raised and floated 
the ice. This was somewhat like cutting a hole in the 
bottom of a ship to let the water out. When such holes 
freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new freezing 
forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled 
internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's 
web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the 
Grhannels worn by the water flowing fz'om all sides to a 
Centre. Sometimes, also, when the ice Avas covered with 
shallow puddles, I saAv a double shadow of myself, one 
standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the 
other on the trees or hill side. 

While yet it is cold Januar}-, and snow and ice are 
thick ancl solid, the prudent landlord comes from the 
village to get ice to cool his summer drink; impressively, 
even pathetically wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of 
July now in January, — wearing a thick coat and mittens! 
when so many things are not provided for. It may be 
that he lays up no treasures in this world which wall cool 
his summer drink in the next. He cuts and saws the 
solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their 
very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like 
corded wood, through the favoring winter air, to wintry 
cellars, to underlie the summer there. It looks like solidi- 
fied azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the streets. These 
ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport, and 
when I went among them they were wont to invite me to 
saw pit-fashion with them, I standing luiderneath. 

In the winter of '4G-7 there came a hundred men of Hy- 
perborean extraction swooping down on to our pond one 
morning, with -many car-loads of ungainly-looking farm- 
ing tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, 
saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double- 
pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the Neiv 
Engknul Farmer or the Cultivator. I did not know whether 



THE POND IN WINTER. 239 

thej' had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other 
kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland. As I 
saw no manure, I judged that they meant to skim the 
land, as I had done, thinking the soil was deep and had 
lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman 
farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to doul^le 
his money, which, as I understood, amounted to half a 
million already; but, in order to cover each one of his dol- 
lars with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin 
itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. 
They went to work at once, ploughing, harrowing, roll- 
ing, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent 
on making this a model farm; but when I was looking 
sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the 
furrow, a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to 
hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, 
clean down to the sand, or rather the water, — for it was 
a very springy soil, — indeed, all the terra firma there was, — 
and haul it away on sleds, and then I guessed that they 
must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went 
every day, with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive, 
from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed 
to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But sometimes 
Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walk- 
ing behind his team, slipped through a crack in the 
ground down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave 
before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, 
almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to take 
refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was 
some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took 
a piece of steel out of a ploughshare, or a plough got set 
in the furrow and had to be cut out. 

To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee 
overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the 
ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well 
known to require description, and these, being sledded 
to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, 
and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, 
worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many 
barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and 
row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an ol)e- 



240 WALDEN. 

lisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in 
a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which 
was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and "cradle 
holes" were worn in the ice, as on terra Jirma, by the 
passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses 
invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out 
like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open 
air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or 
seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers 
to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never so 
cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, 
leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and 
finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue 
fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse 
meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered 
with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss- 
grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the 
abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac, — 
his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They 
calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would 
reach its destination, and that two or three per cent 
would be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater 
part of this heap had a different destiny from what was 
intended ; for, either because the ice was found not to keep 
so well as was expected, containing more air than usual, 
•or for some other reason, it never got to market. This 
heap, made in the winter of '46-7 and estimated to con- 
tain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and 
boards; and though it was unroofed the following July, 
and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to 
the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, 
and was not quite melted till September, 1S4S. Thus the 
pond recovered the greater part. 

Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has 
a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you 
can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or the 
merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. 
Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice- 
man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week 
like a great emerald, an object of interest to all passers. 
I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the 



THE POND IN WINTER. 241 

state of water was green will often, when frozen, appear 
from the same point of view blue. So the hollows about 
this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a 
greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day 
will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue color of water 
and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the 
most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an interesting sub- 
ject for contemplation. They told me that they had 
some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which 
was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water 
soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? 
It is commonly said that this is the difference between 
the affections and the intellect. 

Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred 
men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and 
horses and apparently all the implements of farming, such 
a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and 
as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the 
lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the 
like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more, 
probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure 
sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and 
the trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, 
and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. 
Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and 
plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, 
like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the 
waves, w^here lately a hundred men securely labored. 

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of 
Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay 
and Calcutta, drink at ni}^ well. In the morning I bathe 
my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy 
of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition j^ears of 
the gods have elasped, and in comparison with which our 
modern world ancl its literature seem puny and trivial; 
and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a 
previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity 
from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my 
well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the 
Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who 
still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, 



242 WALDEN. 

or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. 
I meet his servant come to draw Avater for his master, and 
our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. 
The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water 
of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the 
site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, 
makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate 
and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in 
the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports 
of which Alexander only heard the names. 



XVII. 

SPRING. 

The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters com- 
monly causes a pond to break up earher; for the water, 
agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away 
the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on 
Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new gar- 
ment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks 
up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account 
both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing 
through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew 
it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of 
'52-3, which gave the ponds so severe a trial. It com- 
monly opens about the first of April, a week or ten days 
later than Fhnt's Pond and Fair-Haven, beginning to 
melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where 
it began to freeze. It indicates better than any water 
hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being 
least affected by transient changes of temperature. A 
severe cold of a few days' duration in March may very 
much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the 
temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. 
A thermometer thrust into the middle of Walden on the 
6th of March, 1S47, stood at 32°, or freezing point; near 
the shore at 33°; in the middle of Flint's Pond, the same 
day, at 32^°; at a dozen rods from the shore, in shallow 
water, under ice a foot thick, at 36°. This difference of 



SPRING. 243 

three and a half degrees between the temperature of the 
deep water and the shallow in the latter pond, and the 
fact that a great proportion of it is comparatively shallow^ 
show why it should l^rcak up so much sooner than Walden. 
The ice in the shallowest part was at this time sevei-al 
inches thinner than in the middle. In mid-winter the mid- 
dle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest there. So, 
also, every one who has waded about the shores of a pond 
in summer must have perceived how much warmer the 
water is close to the shore, where only three or four inches 
deep, than a little distance out, and on the surface where 
it is deep, than near the bottom. In spring the sun not 
only exerts an influence through the increased tempera- 
ture of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice 
a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in 
shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the 
under side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting 
it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing 
the air bubbles which it contains to extend themselves 
upward and downward until it is completely honey- 
combed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring 
rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake 
begins to rot or " comb," that is, assume the apjDearance 
of honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air cells 
are at right angles with what was the water surface. 
Where there is a rock or a log rising near to the surface 
the ice over it is much thinner, and is frequently quite 
dissolved by this reflected heat ; and I have been told that 
in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a 
shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated 
underneath, and so had access to both sides, the reflec- 
tion of the sun from the bottom more than counter- 
balanced this advantage. AVhen a warm rain in the mid- 
dle of the winter m.elts off the snow-ice from Walden, and 
leaves a hard, dark, or transparent ice on the middle, 
there will be a strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a 
rod or more wide, about the shores, created by this re- 
flected heat. Also, as I have said, the bubbles themselves 
within the ice operate as burning-glasses to melt the ice 
beneath. 

The phenomena of the year take place every day in a 



244 WALDEN. 

pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speak- 
ing, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than 
the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, 
and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the 
morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night 
is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring 
and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and 
booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature. One 
pleasant morning after a cold night, February 24th, 1850, 
having gone to Flint's Pond to spend the day, I noticed 
with surprise that when I struck the ice with the head 
of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods around, 
or as if I had struck on a tight drumhead. The pond 
began to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt 
the influence of the sun's rays slanted upon it from over 
the hills ; it stretched itself and yawned like a waking man 
with a gradually increasing tumult, which was kept up 
three or four hours. It took a short siesta at noon, and 
boomed once more toward night, as the sun was with- 
drawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather 
a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. But 
in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and the air 
also being less elastic, it had completely lost its resonance, 
and probably fishes and muskrats could not then have 
been stunned by a blow on it. The fishermen say that 
the " thundering of the pond " scares the fishes and pre- 
vents their biting. The pond does not thunder every even- 
ing, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thunder- 
ing; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, 
it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and 
thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it has its 
law to which it thunders obedience when it should as surely 
as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is all alive 
and covered with papilla). The largest pond is as sensitive 
to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its 
tube. 

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that 
I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring 
come in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be 
honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. 



SPRING. 245 

Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting 
the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see 
how I shall get through the winter without adding to my 
wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary. I am 
on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance 
note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, 
for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the 
woodchuck venture out of his winter cjuarters. On the 
13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song- 
sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot 
thick. As the weather grew warmer, it was not sensibly 
worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off 
as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for 
half a rod in width about the shore, the middle was merely 
honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you 
could put your foot through it when six inches thick; 
but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain 
followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all 
gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I went 
across the middle only five days before it disappeared en- 
tirely. In 1845 Walden was first completelv open on the 
1st of April; in '46, the 25th of March; in '47, the Sth of 
April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, the 18th of April; 
in '53, the 23rd of March; in '54, about the 7th of April. 

Every incident connected with the breaking up of the 
rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is partic- 
ularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great 
extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell 
near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling 
whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent 
from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly 
going out. So the alhgator comes out of the mud with 
quakings of the earth. One old man, who has been a 
close observer of Nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in 
regard to all her operations as if she had been put upon 
the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay 
her keel, — who has come to his growth, and can hardly 
acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age 
of Methuselah, — told me, and I was surprised to hear 
him express wonder at any of Nature's operations, for I 
thought that there were no secrets between them, that 



246 WALDEN. 

one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought 
that he would have a Httle sport with the ducks. There 
was ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of 
the river, and he dropped down without obstruction from 
Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair-Haven Pond, which he 
found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a 
firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he Avas sur- 
prised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not see- 
ing any ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side 
of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself in 
the bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was 
melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there 
was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy 
bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought 
it likely that some would be along pretty soon. After he 
had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and 
seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and 
impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually 
swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal 
and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which 
seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast body 
of fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he 
started up in haste and excited; but he found, to his sur- 
prise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he 
lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had 
heard was made by its edge grating on the shore, — at 
first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heav- 
ing up and scattering its wrecks along the island to a 
considerable height before it came to a standstill. 

At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, 
and warm winds blow up mist and rain and melt the 
snow-banks, and the sun dispersing the mist smiles on a 
checkered landscape of russet and white smoking with 
incense, through which the traveller picks his way from 
islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling 
rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of 
winter which they are bearing off. 

Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe 
the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing 
down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through 
which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon 



SPRING. 247 

not very common on so large a scale, though the number 
of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have 
been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. 
The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of 
various rich colore, commonly mixed with a little clay. 
When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a 
thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down 
the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the 
snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen 
before. Innumerable little streams overlap and inter- 
lace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid prod- 
uct, which obeys halfway the law of currents, and half- 
way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of 
sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a 
foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down 
on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses 
of some lichens ; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards' 
paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and ex- 
crements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, 
whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort 
of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than 
acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; 
destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become 
a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed 
me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the 
light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich 
and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, 
gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass 
reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out 
flatter into st7xinds, the separate streams losing their 
semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat 
and broad, running together as they are more moist, till 
they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beauti- 
fulh' shaded, but in which you can trace the original 
forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, 
they are converted into banks, like those formed off the 
mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in 
the ripple marks on the bottom. 

The whole bank, which is from tw^enty to forty feet 
high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of 
foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one 



248 WALDEN. 

or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What 
makes this sand fohage remarkable is its springing into 
existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the 
inert bank, — for the sun acts on one side first, — and on 
the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, 
I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the labora- 
tory of the Artist who made the world and me — had 
come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, 
and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs 
about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, 
for this sand}^ overflow is something such a foliaceous 
mass as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in 
the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No 
wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, 
it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have 
already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The 
overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, 
whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick 
lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs 
and the leaves of fat (XecfSo), labor, lapsus, to flow or slip 
downward, a lapsing; Ao^Qos, globus, lobe, globe; also lap, 
flap, and many other words), externally a dry thin leaf, even 
as the / and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals 
of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, 
double lobed), with a liquid I behind it pressing it forward. 
In globe, gib, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capac- 
ity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are 
still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from 
the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering 
butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and 
translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even 
ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed 
into moulds which the fronds of water plants have im- 
pressed on the water}^ mirror. The whole tree itself is but 
one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is in- 
tervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects 
in their axils. 

When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but 
in the morning the streams will start once more and 
l^ranch and branch again into a myriad of others. You 
here see perchance how blood vessels are formed. If you 



J 



SPRING. 249 

look closely 3^011 observe that first there pushes forward 
from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a 
drop-like point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way 
slowly and blindly downward, until at last with more 
heat and moisture, as the sun gets higher, the most fluid 
portion, in its effort to obey the law to which the most 
inert also yields, separates from the latter and forms for 
itself a meandering channel or artery within that, in 
which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like lightning 
from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, 
and ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonder- 
ful how rapidly yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as 
it flows, using the best material its mass affords to form 
the sharp edges of its channel. Such are the sources of 
rivers. In the silicious matter which the water deposits 
is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer soil and 
organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What is 
man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human 
finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow 
to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. Who 
knows what the human body would expand and flow out 
to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spread- 
ing palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be 
regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side 
of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip — labium, from 
labor (?) — laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous 
mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalac- 
tite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent drip- 
ping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into 
the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek 
bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is 
a thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller; the lobes 
are the fingers of the leaf; and as many lobes as it has, in 
so many directions it tends to flow, and more heat or 
other genial influences would have caused it to flow yet 
farther. 

Thus it seemed that this one hill side illustrated the 
principle of ah the operations of Nature. The Maker of 
this earth but patented a leaf. W^hat Champollion will de- 
cipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a 
new leaf at last? This phenomenon is more exhilarating 



250 WALDEN. 

to me than the kixuriance and fertihty of vineyards. True, 
it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there 
is no end to the heaps of Hver, hghts, and bowels, as if the 
globe were turned wrong side outward; but this suggests 
at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is 
mother of humanity. This is the frost coming out of the 
ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery 
spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry, I know of 
nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. 
It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling clothes, 
and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh 
curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing in- 
organic. These foliaccous heaps lie along the bank like the 
slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" 
within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, 
stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be 
studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living 
poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and 
fruit, — not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared 
with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life 
is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuvia) from 
their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them 
into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never 
excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out 
into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it, are 
plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. 

Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and 
plain and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the 
ground like a dormant quadruped from its burrow, and 
seeks the sea w4th music, or migrates to other climes in 
clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion is more powerful 
than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other 
but breaks in pieces. 

When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few 
warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant 
to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just' 
peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vege- 
tation which had withstood the winter, — life-everlasting, 
goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses, more 
obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, 
as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, 



SPRING. 251 

cattails, mulleins, Johnswort, harclhack, meadow-sweet, 
and other strong stemmed plants, those unexhausted gran- 
aries which entertain the earliest birds, — decent weeds, at 
least, which widowed Nature wears. I am particularly 
attracted by the arching and sheaf-like top of the wool- 
grass ; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, 
and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, 
in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types 
already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an 
antique style older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the 
phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible 
tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to 
hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; 
but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of 
Summer. 

At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my 
house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat read- 
ing or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and 
chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that 
ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped 
the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad 
pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No you don't — 
chickaree — chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my argu- 
ments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a 
strain of invective that was irresistible. 

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with 
younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings 
heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the 
bluebird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the 
last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell ! What at such a 
time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written 
revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the 
spring. The marsh-hawk sailing low over the meadow is 
already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sink- 
ing sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice 
dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the 
hill sides like a spring fire, — "et primitus oritur herba 
imbrilnis primoribus evocata," — as if the earth sent forth 
an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but 
green is the color of its flame; — the symbol of perpetual 
youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams 



252 WALDEN. 

from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the 
frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last 
year's hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily 
as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical 
with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills 
are dry, the grass-blades are their channels, and from year 
to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and 
the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So 
our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts 
forth its green blade to eternity. 

Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods 
wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider 
still at the east end. A great field of ice has cracked off 
from the main body. I hear a song-sparrow singing from 
the bushes on the shore, — olit, olit, olit, — ckij), chip, chip, 
che, chew, — che iciss, iviss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it. 
How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the 
ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more 
regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe 
but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace 
floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque sur- 
face in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is 
glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the 
sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if 
it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on 
its shore, — a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, 
as it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast between 
winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive again. 
But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said. 

The change from storm and winter to serene and mild 
weather, from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elas- 
tic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. 
It is seemingly instantaneous at last. Suddenly an in- 
flux of light filled my house, though the evening was at 
hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the 
eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked out the 
window, and lo! where yesterday was cold gray ice there 
lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in 
a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its 
bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had in- 
telligence with some remote horizon. I heard a robin in 



SPRING. 253 

the distance, the first I had lieard for many a thousand 
years, metliought, whose note I shall not forget for many 
a thousand more, — the same sweet and j^owerful song as of 
yore. O tlie evening robin, at the end of a New England 
summer day ! If I could ever find the twig he sits upon ! I 
mean he; I mean the twig. This at least is not the Turdus 
7mgratorius. The pitch-pines and shrub-oaks about my 
house, which had so long drooped, suddenly resumed their 
several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more 
erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by 
the rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You 
may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your 
very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not. As it 
grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese flj'ing 
low over the woods, like weary travellers getting in late 
from southern lakes, and indulging at last in unrestrained 
complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, 
I could hear the rush of their wings; when, driving toward 
my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed 
clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, 
and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the 
woods. 

In the morning I watched the geese from the door 
through the mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty 
rods off, so large and tumultuous that Walden appeared 
like an artificial pond for their amusement. But when I 
stood on the shore they at once rose up with a great flap- 
ping of wings at the signal of their commander, and when 
they had got into rank, circled about over my head, 
twenty-nine of them, and then steered straight to Canada, 
with a regular honk from the leader at intervals, trusting 
to break their fast in muddier pools. A " plump " of ducks 
rose at the same time and took the route to the north in 
the wake of their noisier cousins. 

For a week I heard the circling groping clangor of some 
solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its com- 
panion, and still peopling the woods with the sound of a 
larger life than they could sustain. In April the pigeons 
were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due 
time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, 
though it had not seemed that the township contained so 



254 WALDEN. 

many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they 
were pecuharly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow 
trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tor- 
toise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds 
of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plum- 
age, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to 
correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the 
equilibrium of Nature. 

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the com- 
ing in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos 
and the realization of the Golden Age. — 

"Eurus ad Auroram, Nabathaeaque regna recessit, 
Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis." 

*'The East-Wind withdrew to Aurora and the Xabathoean kingdom, 
And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays. 

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ 
Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things, 
The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed; 
Or the earth being recent and lately sundered from the high 
Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven." 

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades 
greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better 
thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present 
always, and took advantage of every accident that befell 
us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the 
slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in 
atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we 
call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already 
spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are 
forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice. AVhile such a sun 
holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return. Through 
our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of 
our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yes- 
terda}' for a thief, a drunkard, or a Sensualist, and merely 
pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world; but the 
sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, re- 
creating the world, and you meet him at some serene work 
and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand 
with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring in- 
fluence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults 



SPRING. 255 

are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good 
will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for ex- 
pression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, Hke a new- 
born instinct, and for a short hour the south hill side echoes 
to no vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots pre- 
paring to burst from his gnarled rind and try another 
year's life, tender and fresh as the youngest plant. Even 
he has entered into the joy of his Lord. Why the jailer 
does not leave open his prison doors, — why the judge does 
not dismiss his case, — why the preacher does not dismiss 
his congregation ! It is because they do not obey the hint 
which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he 
freely offers to all. 

"A return to goodness produced each day in the tran- 
quil and beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in 
respect to the love of virtue and the hatred of vice, one 
approaches a little the primitive nature of man, as the 
sprouts of the forest which has been felled. In like maimer 
the evil which one does in the interval of a day prevents 
the germs of virtues which began to spring up again from 
developing themselves and destroys them. 

"After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented 
many times from developing themselves, then the benefi- 
cent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. 
As soon as the breath of evening does not suffice longer to 
preserve them, then the nature of man does not differ 
much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature of 
this man like that of the brute, think that he has never 
possessed the innate faculty of reason. Are those the true 
and natural sentiments of man?" 

"The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger 
Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude. 
Punishment and fear were not; nor were threatening words read 
On suspended brass; nor did the suppliant crowd fear 
The words of their judge; but were safe without an avenger. 
Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended 
To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world, 
And mortals knew no shores but their own. 

There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm 
Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed." 

On the 29th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of 



236 WALDEN. 

the river near the Nine-Acre-Corner bridge, standing on the 
quaking grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, 
I heard a singular rattling sound, somewhat like that of 
the sticks which boys play with their fingers, when, look- 
ing up, I observed a very slight and graceful hawk, like a 
night-hawk, alternately soaring like a ripple and tumbling 
a rod or two over and over, showing the underside of its 
wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like 
the pearly inside of a shell. T^is sight reminded me of 
falconry and what nobleness and poetry are associated 
with that sport. The Merlin it seemed to me it might be 
called : but I care not for its name. It was the most ethe- 
real flight I had ever witnessed. It did not simply flutter 
like a butterflj-, nor soar like the larger hawks, but it 
sported with proud reliance in the fields of air; mounting 
again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its 
free and beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, 
and then recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had 
never set its foot on terra firma. It appeared to have no 
companion in the universe, — sporting there alone, — and 
to need none but the morning and the ether with which it 
played. It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely 
beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its 
kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the 
air, it seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched 
sometime' in the crevice of a crag ; — or was its native nest 
made in the angle of a cloud, woven of the rainbow's trim- 
mings and the sunset sky, and lined with some soft mid- 
summer haze caught up from earrh? Its eyry now some 
cliffy cloud. 

Besides this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and 
bright cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. 
Ah ! I have penetrated to those meadows on the morning 
of many a first spring day, jumping from hummock to 
hummock, from willow root to willow root, when the wild 
river valley and the woods were bathed in so pure and 
bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had 
been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There! 
needs no stronger proof of immortality. All things must 
live in such a light. Death, where was thy sting? 
Grave, where was thy victory, then? 



SPRING. 257 

Our villag'o life would stagnate if it were not for the 
unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. AA'e 
need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes 
where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the 
booming of the snipe ; to smell the whispering sedge where 
only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, 
and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. 
At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn 
all things, we rec^uire that all things be mysterious and un- 
explorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsur- 
veyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We 
can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed 
by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic fea- 
tures, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its 
living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the 
rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We 
need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life 
pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered 
when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which 
disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and 
strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the 
hollow by the path to m}^ house, which compelled me 
sometimes to go out of m}' way, especiall}' in the night 
when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of 
the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was 
my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so 
rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed 
and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organ- 
izations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like 
pulp; — tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and 
toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has 
rained flesh and blood ! With the liability to accident, we 
must see how little account is to be made of it. The im- 
pression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. 
Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. 
Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be ex- 
peditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped. 

Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other 
trees, just putting out amidst the pine woods around the 
pond, imparted a brightness like sunshine to the land- 
scape, especially in cloudy days, as if the sun were break- 



258 WALDEiY. 

ing through mists and shining faintly on the hill sides here 
and there. On the third or fourth of May I saw a loon in 
the pond, and during the first week of the month I heard 
the whippoorwill, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood- 
pewee, chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood- 
thrush long before. The phoebe had alread}^ come once 
more and looked in at my door and window, to see if my 
house was cavern-like enough for her, sustaining herself on 
humming wings with clinched talons, as if she held by the 
air, while she surveyed the premises. The sulphur-like 
pollen of the pitch-pine soon covered the pond and the 
stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could 
have collected a barrelful. This is the "sulphur showers" 
w^e hear of. Even in Calidasa's drama of Sacontala, we 
read of " rills dyed yellow with the golden dust of the lo- 
tus." And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as 
one rambles into higher and higher grass. 

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; 
and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden 
September 6th, 1847. 

XVIII. 

CONCLUSION. 

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of 
air and scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. 
The buckeye does not grow in Xew England, and the 
mocking-bird is rarety heard here. The wild goose is more 
of a cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, 
takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the 
night in a southern bayou. Even the l^ison to some extent 
keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of the 
Colorado only till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him 
by the Yellowstone. Yet we think that if rail-fences are 
pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, 
bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates de- 
cided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot 
go to Terra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to 
the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The imivei"se is 
wider than our views of it. 



CONCLUSION. 259 

Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, 
like curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stu- 
pid sailors picking oakum. The 'other side of the globe is 
but the home of our correspondent. Our voyage is only 
great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of 
the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase 
the giraffe; l^ut surely that is not the game he would be 
after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he 
could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; 
but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self. — 

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find 
A thousand regions in your mind 
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be 
Expert in home-cosmography." 

What does Africa, — ^what does the West stand for? Is 
not our o^^^l interior white on the chart? black though it 
may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the 
source of the Xile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a 
Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would 
find? Are these the problems which most concern man- 
kind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife 
should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know 
where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis 
and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; 
explore your own higher latitudes, — with shiploads of 
preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and 
pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved 
meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a 
Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, 
opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every 
man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly em- 
pire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the 
ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, 
and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil 
which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the 
spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a 
maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that 
South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and 
expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there 
are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every 
man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but 



260 WALDEN. 

that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold 
and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five 
hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore 
the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's 
being alone. — 

"Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos. 
Plus habet hie vitse, plus habet ille vise." 

"Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians. 
I have more of God, they more of the road." 

It is not worth the while to go round the world to 
count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can 
do better, and you may perhaps find some "Symmes' 
Hole " by which to get at the inside at last. England 
and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave 
Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them 
has ventured out sight of land, though it is without doubt 
the direct way to India. If you would learn to speak all 
tongues and conform to the customs of all nations, if you 
would travel farther than all travellers, be naturalized 
in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to dash her head 
against a stone, even obey the precept of the old philoso- 
pher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the 
eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go 
to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist. Start now 
on that farthest western way, which docs not pause at 
the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn- 
out China or Japan, but leads on direct a tangent to this 
sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, 
moon down, and at last earth down too. 

It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to 
ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in 
order to place one's self in formal opposition to the most 
sacred laws of society." He declared that " a soldier who 
fights in the ranks does not require half so much courage 
as a foot-pad," — "that honor and religion have never 
stood in the way of a well-considered and a firm resolve." 
This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, 
if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself 
often enough " in formal opposition " to what are deemed 



CONCLUSION. 261 

"the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to 
yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution 
without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put 
himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain 
himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obe- 
dience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of 
opposition to a just government, if he should chance to 
meet with such. 

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. 
Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to 
live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It 
is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a 
particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. 
I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path 
from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or 
six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is 
true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so 
helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft 
and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths 
which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, 
must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts 
of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a 
cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on 
the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moon- 
light amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below 
now. 

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one 
advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and 
endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will 
meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He 
will put some things behind, will pass an invisible bound- 
ary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to 
establish themselves around and within him; or the old 
laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more 
liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher 
order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, 
the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and 
solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor 
weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, 
your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. 
Now put the foundations under them. 



262 WALDEN. 

It is a ridiculous demand which England and America 
make, that you shall speak so that they can understand 
you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that 
were important, and there were not enough to under- 
stand you without them. As if Nature could support but 
one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as 
well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and 
hush and who, which Bright can understand, were the 
best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. 
I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant 
enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow 
limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the 
truth of which I have been convinced. Extravagance! it 
depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo 
which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not ex- 
travagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the 
cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking-time. 
I desire to speak- somewhere without bounds; like a man 
in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments: 
for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even 
to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has 
heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak 
extravagantly any more forever? In view of the future or 
possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined in front, 
our outlines dim and misty on that side; as our shadows 
reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The vola- 
tile truth of our words should continually betray the inad- 
equacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly 
translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words 
which express our faith and piety are not definite ; yet they 
are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior 
natures. 

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, 
and praise that as common sense? The commonest 
sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by 
snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to class those who 
are once-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted, because 
we appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would 
find fault with the morning-red, if they ever got up early 
enough. "They pretend," as I hear, "that the verses of 
Kabir have four different senses: illusion, spirit, intellect, 



CONCLUSION. 263 

and the exoteric doctrine of the Vedas;" but in this part 
of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a 
man's writings admit of more than one interpretation. 
While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not 
any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so 
much more widely and fatally? 

I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, 
but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found 
with my pages on this score than was found with the 
Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its blue color, 
which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy, 
and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white, but 
tastes of weeds. The purity men love is like the mists 
w^hich envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether 
beyond. 

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and 
moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with 
the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is 
that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead 
lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs 
to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that 
he can? Let every one mind his own business, and en- 
deavor to be what he was made. 

Why should we be in such deperate haste to succeed, 
and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not 
keep pace wnth his companions, perhaps it is because he 
hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music 
which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not 
important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree 
or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the 
condition of things which we were made for is not yet, 
what were any reality which we can substitute? We 
will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with 
pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though 
when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true 
ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not? 

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was dis- 
posed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his 
mind to make a staff. Having- considered that in an im- 
perfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect 
work time does not enter, he said to himself. It shall be 



264 WALDEN. 

perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in 
my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, 
being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable 
material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after 
stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew 
old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a 
moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and 
his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, 
with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with 
Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a dis- 
tance because he could not overcome him. Before he had 
found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo 
was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel 
the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the 
dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the 
point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that 
race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the 
time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was 
no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule 
and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had 
awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay 
to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was 
put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of 
the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations 
of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a 
staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, 
though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, 
fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. 
And now he saw b}^ the heap of shavings still fresh at his 
feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time 
had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed 
than is required for a single scintillation from the brain 
of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal 
brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how 
could the result be other than wonderful? 

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so 
well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the 
most part, we are not where we are, but in a false posi- 
tion. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose 
a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two 
cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get 



CONCLUSION. 265 

out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case 
that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. 
Any truth is better than make-beheve. Tom Hyde, the 
tinker, standing on the gahows, was asked if he had any- 
thing to say. '.'Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember 
to make a knot in their thread before they take the first 
stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten. 

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not 
shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you 
are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault- 
finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, 
poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, 
thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting 
sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as 
brightly as from the rich man's abode the snow melts 
before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a 
quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as 
cheering thoughts, as in a palace. The town's poor seem 
to me often to live the most independent lives of any. 
Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without 
misgiving. Most think that they are above being sup- 
ported by the town; but it oftencr happens that they are 
not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, 
which should be more disreputable. Cultivate poverty 
like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself 
much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn 
the old ; return to them. Things do not change ; wc change. 
Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see 
that you do not want society. If I were confined to a 
corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world 
would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about 
me. The philosopher said : " From an army of three divi- 
sions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder; 
from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot 
take away his thought." Do not seek so anxiously to be 
developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be 
played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness 
reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty 
and meanness gather around us, " and lo ! creation widens 
to our view." We are often reminded that if there were 
bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still 



266 WALDEN. 

be the same, and our means essentially the same. ]\Iore- 
over, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if 
you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you 
are but confined to the most significant and vital experi- 
ences; you are compelled to deal with the material wdiich 
yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near 
the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from 
being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by 
magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy 
superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one 
necessaiy of the soul. 

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composi- 
tion was poured a little alloy of bell metal. Often, in the 
repose of my midday, there reaches my ears a confused 
tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my con- 
temporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventures 
with famous gentlemen and ladies,, what notabilities they 
met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in 
such things than in the contents of the Dciilij Times. The 
interest and the conversation are about costume and 
manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as 
5^ou will. They tell me of California and Texas, of Eng- 
land and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr. of Georgia or 

of Massachusetts, all transient and fleeting phenomena, 
till I am ready to leap from their coiut-yard like the 
Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings, — not 
walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicu- 
ous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the imi- 
versc, if I may, — not to live in this restless, nervous, 
bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit 
thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrat- 
ing? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and 
hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the 
president of the day, and Webster is His orator. I love 
to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most 
strongly and rightfully attracts me; — not hang by the 
beam of the scale and try to weigh less, — not suppose a 
ease, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I 
can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords 
me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before 
I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittly- 



CONCLUSION. 2G7 

benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read 
that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him 
had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But 
presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, 
and he observed to the boy, " I thought you said that this 
bog had a hard bottom." "So it has," answered the 
latter, "but you have not got half way to it yet." So it 
is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an 
old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or 
done at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not 
be one of those who wall foolishly drive a nail into mere 
lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake 
nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the fur- 
ring. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home 
and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the 
night and think of 3'our work with satisfaction, — a work 
at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse, 
So will help 3'ou God, and so only. Every nail driven 
should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, 
you carrying on the work. 

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me 
truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in 
abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity 
and truth w-ere not; and I went away hungry from the 
inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the 
ices. I thought that there W'as no need of ice to freeze 
them. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the 
fame of the vintage; but I thought of an older, a newer, 
and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they 
had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house 
and grounds and "entertainment," pass for nothing with 
me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his 
hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospi- 
tality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived 
in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal. I should 
have done better had I called on him. 

How long shall we sit in our porticos practising idle 
and musty virtues, which any work would make imperti- 
nent? As if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, 
and hire a man to hoe his jiotatoes; and in the afternoon 
go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with 



268 WALDEN. 

goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride and 
stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation 
reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of 
an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris 
and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its 
progress in art and science and literature with satisfac- 
tion. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, 
and the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is the good 
Adam contemplating his own virtue. ''Yes, we have 
done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall 
never die," — that is, as long as we can remember them. 
The learned societies and great men of Assyria, — where, 
are they? What youthful philosophers and experi-l 
mentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who 
has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the 
spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the 
seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year 
locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere 
pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not 
delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many 
above it. We know not where we are. Besides, we are 
sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem our- 
selves wise, and have an established order on the surface. 
Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! 
As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles 
on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from 
my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble 
thoughts and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, 
be its benefactor and impart to its race some cheering in- 
formation, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and 
Intelligence that stands over me, the human insect. 

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, 
and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only sug- 
gest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most 
enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and 
sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung 
with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and 
mean. We think that we can change our clothes only. 
It is said that the British Empire is very large and re- 
spectable, and that the United States are a first-rate 
power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls be- 



|i 



COA'CLUSIOX. 269 

lind every man which can float the British Empire like 
I chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who 
cnows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come 
)ut of the ground? The government of the world I live 
n was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner 
'onversations over the wine. 

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may 
•ise this year higher than man has ever known it, and 
lood the parched uplands; even this may be the event- 
"ul year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was 
lot always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the 
oanks which the stream anciently washed, before science 
began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the 
^tory which has gone the rounds of New England, of a 
strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf 
of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a 
farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and 
afterward in Massachusetts, — from an egg deposited in 
the living tree many j^ears earlier still, as appeared by 
counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard 
gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the 
heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrec- 
tion and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? 
Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg 
has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of 
woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at 
the first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, 
which has been gradually converted into the semblance 
of its well-seasoned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing 
out now for years by the astonished family of man, as 
they sat round the festive board, — may unexpectedly 
come forth from amidst society's most trivial and hand- 
selled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! 

I do not say that John or Jonathan will reaHze all 
this; but such is the character of that morrow which 
mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light 
which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day 
dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to 
dawn. The sun is but a morning star. 



NOTES. 

[The numerals in bold-faced type indic-ate the page and the line.] 

Walden was first published in 1854: . The present edition follows 
the original text. Many passages are taken from the Journal 
which Thoreau was already keeping while living at the Pond. 
This Journal, which was the source of his numerous posthumous 
books, is now accessible in the " Manuscript Edition " of Thoreau, 
1906. 

3-6. Two years and two months. That is, from July, 1845, 
to vSeptember, 1S47. 

4—31. Labors of Hercules. Thoreau's writings are sprinkled 
throughout with allusions to classical literature and mythology, 
which may be found explained in any classical dictionary. On 
the present reference, and in particular on the incident of lolaus 
and the hydra, see (Jayley's Classic Myths, p. 235. 

5-12. Augean stables. See Classic Myths, p. 235. 

5-22. Moth and rust will corrupt. See Mattheiv 6 : 19. 

5-25. Deucalion and Pyrrha. See Classic Myths, p. 49. The 
two Latin lines are from Ovid's Metamorphoses, I, 414-415. 

7-21. Wilberforce. William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was a 
leader in the movement for the abolition of slavery in the British 
possessions. 

7-35. The chief end of man. A reference to the first question in 
the Westminster Shorter Catechism; the answer being that man's 
chief end is "to glorify God and enjoy him forever." 

9-3. John Evelyn, the famous diarist, was the author of a learned 
work on trees, called Sylva, published 1664. 

9-8. Hippocrates was considered by the ancient world to be the 
" father of medicine " ; he died in the year 377. 

10-21. On Thoreau's interest in Oriental writers, see the Intro- 
duction, p. xiv. Confucius, the chief sage of China, died 478 B.C. 
Thoreau reprinted in the Dial, in April, 1843, certain "Sayings 
of Confucius," from translations made by Dr. Marshman. 

11-26. Darwin visited South America in 1831, and published an 
account of his voyage in 1840. 

11-32. New Hollander is the older name for Australian. 

11-36. Liebig was a great German chemist (1803-1873). 

15-6. Secrets in my trade. See Thoreau's account of his 
"present employment," quoted in the Introduction, p. v. 

15-11. I long ago lost a hound, etc. This symbohc passage has 
never been explained in detail. Emerson called it Thoreau's 
"mythical record of his disappointments," and remarked that he 
"knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his experience." 

271 



272 NOTES. 

15-40. manna-wise, would dissolve. See Exodus 16 : 21. 

18-16. La Perouse (1741-17SS) was a French navigator who 
perished by shipwreck, with his whole expedition, off the Santa 
Cruz Islands. 

18-19. Hanno was a Carthaginian navigator, said to have lived 
in the fifth century b.c. 

20-3. Madam Pfeiffer (1797-1S5S) was an Austrian traveler who 
published in 1S50 her account of a journey around the world. 

21-6. Mortal coil. An allusion to Shakespeare's words, "When 
we have shuffled off this mortal coil," in Hamlet, III, i, 67. The 
word coll means tumult, trouble, but Thoreau probably supposed 
it to involve some idea of a hindering envelope or entangling 
garment of the soul. 

22-13. The Parcae. The Fates. See Classic Myths, p. 72. 

22-40. Harlequin was the conventional clown of Italian comedies 
and puppet-shows. 

23-"?9. Samuel Laing (1780-1S6S) was a Scottish traveler; his 
Jounuil of a Residence in Xorway was published 1S36. 

24^35. Our lives are domestic. Alluding to the connection of 
the word with domus, a house. 

25-33. Daniel Gookin (died 1687) wrote Historical Collections of 
the Indians of Massachusetts, published 1792. 

27-35. The fathers have eaten sour grapes. See Ezekiel IS : 2; 
the verses quoted are from the same passage. 

28-37. Suent. A rare provincial word, meaning smooth. 

29-4. Chapman. The Elizaliethan dramatist and translator of 
Homer. The quotation is from liis tragedy, Ca'sar and Fompey, 
Act V, scene ii. 

29-13. Momus. A Greek deity representing censure and 
mockery, who was represented as raising unexpected objections to 
any creation of the other gods. 

31-10. Glowshoes. Apparently a corruption of galoshes, over- 
shoes. 

31-35. On Aurora and Memnon, see Classic Myths, pp. 73, 199. 
With the ideas in this passage, compare Thoreau's words in a 
letter of August 8, 1854: "Only think, for a moment, of a man 
about his affairs! How we should respect him! How glorious he 
would appear! Not working for any corporation, its agent, or 
president, ])ut fulfilling the end of his being! A man about his 
business would be the cj'nosure of all eyes." 

31-37. Sardanapalus, otherwise Asurbanipal, was king of 
Assyria in the seventh centiuy B.C., and his reign was celebrated 
for its wealth and splendor. Cf. Byron's tragedy Sardanapalus. 

33-22. Edward Johnson's History of New England, otherwise 
called the " Wonder-Working Providence," was pubH.shed in 1654. 

33-33. This secretary of New Netherland was Cornelius van 
Tienhofen, some of whose writings are preserved in the collection 
called Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of 
Xcic York. 

36-14. Men say they know, etc. The verses printed without 
marks of quotation are Thoreau's own — scraps from his tliaries 



NOTES. 273 

or commonplace-books which he occasionally intersperses in his 
prose writings. 

38-13. Removal of the gods. That is, by ^Eneas; see the open- 
ing lines of the .Eiwid. 

38-34. Character of his raisers. Among these "raisers" were 

■ Bronson Alcott, CJeorge William Curtis, and Edmund Hosmer, one 

of Thoreau's best friends at Concord. Curtis describes the occasion 

m his contribution to the volume called Homes of American Authors. 

44-31. Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1S23), 
and Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832) were the most distinguished of 
the early modern writers on economics. 

45-17. Flying Childers was a celebrated English race-horse of the 
early eighteenth centurj'. 

47-28. Arthur Young's Annals of Agriculture were published in 
England between 17.S4 and ISU'J. 

49-8. Bhagvat-Geeta. The "song of Bhagavat," a poem of 
India supposed to date from the first or second century. 

49-14. In Arcadia. Perhaps an allusion to the motto "Et in 
Arcadia ego" ("I also have been in Arcadia"), found in Poussin's 
famous painting called "Arcadia," and frequently cited in modern 
hterature'. The land of Arcadia is commonly taken as a symbol 
of rustic simplicity and contentment. 

50-2. Vitruvius was the author of a work on architecture, 
written in the age of Augustus. 

54-8. The passage is from the 74th chapter of Cato's treatise 
De Agri Cultura. 

57-31. The evil that men do, etc. From Julius Cccsar. Ill, 
ii, SO. 

57-37. Auction. An allusion to the connection of the word 
with the Latin augcre, to increase. 

58-9. William Bartram, an early American naturalist, pub- 
lished Ills Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, etc., 
in 1791. In Part 3, chapter 8, he dsecribes the "Moccalassa" 
Indians. 

59-28. Keep the flocks of Admetus. That is, like Apollo: see 
Classic Myths, p. 130. 

63-37. Robin Goodfellow. The wandering "Puck" of early 
fairy lore, descriljed in Shakespeare's Midsummer N'ight's Dream, 
II, i, 32-57. 

63-4. Phaeton. See Classic Myths, pp. 121-125. 

63-28. John Howard was an Englishman who devoted himself 
to the reform of prisons; his State of t lie Prisons was published 1777. 

65-14. WiUiam Penn (1644-1718) and Elizabeth Fry (1780- 
1845) were prominent Friends or Quakers; Mrs. Fry, like Flowari^l, 
was a prison reformer. 

66-36. Enduring him forever. An ironic perversion of the 
answer to the first question of the Westminster Catechism (see 
note to p. 7 above), perhaps with some reference to the refrain 
of the 118th Psalm, — " His mercy endureth forever." In Thoreau's 
present mood the formal piety of his ancestors and his neighbors, 
as expressed in public worship, seemed forced, conventional, and 



274 NOTES. 

lacking in true spiritual joy. It is interesting to find that to 
his friend Ellery Clianning it seemed tliat even Thoreau and 
Emerson showed in their own temperaments the same Puritan 
seriousness and want of " simple and irrepressible satisfaction with 
the gift of life." "Emerson was never in the least contented," he 
WTote in a note to his book on Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. " ' When 
shall I be perfect? when shall I t)e moral? when shall I be this and 
that? when will the really good rhyme get written?' Here is the 
Emerson colic. Thoreau had a like disease." (1902 ed., p. 132.) 

67-13. Sadi of Shiraz was a celeljrated Persian poet, said to have 
lived 1190-1291. The Gulistan has been translated into English 
by Eastwick. 

67-38. The Pretensions of Poverty. These verses are iVom 
Carew's masque called Caium Britannicum (1634); Mercury is 
represented in them as addressing Poverty. 

69-34. " I am monarch," etc. The opening lines of Cowper's 
poem on Alexander Selkirk. 

71-1. De Re Rustica. The same as the De Agri Cultura (see 
p. 54, and note). The passage is from the first chapter. 

71-14. An ode to dejection. Thoreau probably had in mind 
Coleridge's ode with this title. 

72-14. The IJarivansa. A Sanscrit poem (the name meaning 
Hari's — that is, Vishnu-Kri.';hna's — race) of some 16,000 lines, 
connected with the epic called the Mahabharata, but of later date. 

74—5. Damodara, a name for Krishna, a divinity of Hindoo 
mythology. 

74-17. The Pleiades and Hyades are constellations, like Cas- 
siopeia; Aldebaran and Altair stars of the first magnitude. 

74-32. Aurora. CJoddess of morn; see Classic Myths, p. 73. 
With the passage compare p. 31 above, and note. 

75-28. The Vedas. The ancient religious books of India, com- 
posed largely of collections of hjTnns and ceremonial writings. 

75-32. On Memnon and Aurora, see note to p. 31. 

77-1. The chief end of man. See p. 7, and note. 

77-4. Like pygmies. The pygmies were a tiny legendary people 
of ancient lore, and, it was said, were attacked each spring by 
flocks of cranes. (See the Iliad, iii, 5.) 

77-7. Life is frittered away. With this passage compare 
Thoreau's words in a letter of March 27, 1S4S: "It is astonishing, 
as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest man thinks 
he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he 
must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult 
problem, he first frees the equation of all incuml)rances, and 
reduces it to its simplest terms. To simplify the problem of life, 
distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see 
where your main roots run. ... I know many men who, in 
common things, are not to be deceived; who trust no moonshine; 
who count their money correctly, and know how to invest it; who 
are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk 
the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in l)anks, and glimmer 
and rust and finally go out there. If they know anything, vrhat 



NOTES. 27 o 

under the sun do they do that for? Do they know what bread 
is? or what it is for? Do they know what life is? If they knew 
something, the places which know them now would know them no 
more forever." * 

81-19. Brahme. According to one form of Hindu religion, this 
word stands for the divine essence which fills the universe, and is 
sometimes worshiped as a person, sometimes thought of as a 
sacred impersonal reality everywhere present. The meaning of 
the passage, then, is substantially this: that when the soul per- 
ceives truth, it realizes that it is in some sense divine. 

82-16. Tied to the mast like Ulysses. That is, that he might 
not be moved l\y the song of the sirens. See Classic Myths, p. 321. 

81-27. Point d'appui. Point of support, basis. 

84-6. Mir Camar Qddin Mast. This poet has not been identified 
by the editors. The word Mast probably means mystic. 

85-6. Delphi and Dodona. Ancient oracles. See Classic Myths, 
pp. 52, Gl. 

87-16. Never yet been printed in English. Thoreau of course 
means the real Homer, the real .Eschylus; there had been plenty 
of translations. 

87-29. Vedas and Zenda vestas. On the Vedas, see note to 
p. 75. The Zenda vesta (that is, the Avesta and Zend, "the Law 
and Commentary") is the Bible of Zoroastrianism, the national 
religion of Persia. 

90-1. Bibles of mankind. See Introduction, p. xiv. 

91-10. Zoroaster, more properly written Zarathustra, was the 
traditional founder of the ancient Persian religion. 

91-40. Abelard. A learned French .scholar (1079-1142). 

92-21. "Neutral family" papers. That is, characterless peri- 
odicals which attempted to gain a "family" circulation among all 
classes, on the ground that they remained neutral on disputed 
questions like slavery. 

92-23. " Olive Branches." In Thorcau's boyhood there was a 
religious weekly published under the name "Olive Branch," to 
which this may be an allusion; or he may have had vaguely in 
mind some recent didactic works of Mrs. Sigourney, called Olive 
Leaves and Olive Buds. 

92-25. Redding & Co. were Boston publishers of cheap fiction, 
in Thoreau's time. 

94-13. Puri Indians, a nearly extinct Brazilian tribe. 

99-13. One of the Fates. See Classic Myths, p. 72. 

99-19. Sons of Tell. That is, to be as "steady" as was William 
Tell's son when his father shot the apple from his head. 

99-30. Buena Vista. The battle of that name, when General 
Taylor defeated the Mexican army, in February, 1S47. 

102-7. -Great ammiral. For "admiral," that is, vessel; a 
quotation from Milton's Paradise Lost, I, 294. 

102-17. Skip like rams. See Psalm 114 : 4. 

104-18. Ben Jonsonian. It is uncertain why the owl's scream 
should have reminded Thoreau of Ben Jonson, the chief Eliza- 
bethan dramatist after Shakespeare. He was a somewhat harsh 



276 NOTES. 

satirist, and more saturnine in temper than his great contem- 
porary, but does not deserve such an appropriation of his name 
as this. 

• 105-20. No day illustrates. A Uteral but rare use of the word 
with the meaning illuminate. 

109-38. Left " the world to darkness," etc. From the first 
stanza of Gray's Elegy. 

109-39. jEolian. That is, caused by the wind. 

110-38. " Mourning untimely," etc. From a metrical render- 
ing of Ossian's Croma. In Macpherson's text tl^e passage runs: 
"But sorrow wastes tlie mournful, O daughter of Toscar! and their 
days are few!" 

113-5. Indra in the sky. In the mythology of the Vedas, Indra 
is the chief of the gods of the air, the wielder of the thunderbolt. 

115-2. He is legion. See Mark 5:9. 

115-10. Original proprietor. It is a little difficult to be sure 
what Thoreau had in mind in the two distinct personifications of 
nature in this paragraph. The "settler and proprietor" would 
seem to symbolize the primitive creative forces; the " elderly dame " 
the perpetual, beneficent forces of growth. 

115-17. Goffe or Whalley. These men were concerned in the 
execution of Charles I, and lived in concealment in New England 
after the Restoration of 1660. They appear in Cooper's The Wept 
of W ish-ton-W ish and Scott's Peveril of the Peak. 

116-3. Old Parrs. Thomas Parr was famous for his age, which 
was reputed to be 152 at his death in 1635. 

116-17. Hygeia. See Clasiiic Myths, p. 72. Hygeia was gotldess 
of health, but l^ecause she was daughter of a physician Thoreau 
rejects her, as representative of restored health sought through 
medicine, preferring Hebe as symbohzing perpetual youth and 
native vigor. 

116-18. iEsculapius. God of medicine. See Classic Myths, p. 130. 

116-23. Wild lettuce. Juno, according to some accounts, gave 
birth to Hel)e after eating wilil lettuce. 

117-14. Tremont or Astor or Middlesex. Prominent hotels of 
the day. 

117-15. Ridiculous mouse. An allusion to Horace's line, exem- 
plifying much display with small accomplishment: "The mountains 
are in labor, but only a ridiculous mouse will be born." 

118-16. A priceless domestic. The summer breeze? 

118-39. Cerberus. Watch-dog. See Classic Mytlis, p. 79. 

119-5. " Arrived there," etc. From The Faerie Queene, I, i, 35. 

119-10. Visit of ceremony to Massasoit. This occurred in 
March, 1621. 

120-27. " Why are you in tears," etc. From the Iliad, xvi, 
7-16. 

124-18. Derivation of the word pecunia. Meaning money, and 
derived from pecus, cattle, — in primitive times the chief form of 
jiroperty. 

128-10. Com-munity. Thoreau connects the word with munire, 
to fortify. 



NOTES. 277 

138-31. " Welcome, Englishmen! " An allusion to the familiar 
incident of the coming of an Indian (Samoset) into Plymouth, 
March 16, 1621, uttering these words, greatly to the surprise of 
the colonists, in their own language. 

129-9. Antaeus. See Classic Mrjths, p. 238. 

131-3. Agricola laboriosus. Hardworking husbandman. 

131-28. Mr. Coleman's report. Rev. Henry Colman, 1785-1849, 
was commissioner to investigate agriculture in Massachusetts, from 
1836-1842, and published several reports. Later he published two 
books on agriculture in Europe. 

131-41. Ranz des Vaches. A Swiss strain played by herdsmen 
on the Alpine horn (literally, "chime of the cows")- 

133-4. Paganini performances. Paganini (1782-1840) was a 
great Italian violinist, famous for playing effectively on the single 
G-string. 

133-35. Virgil's advice. In the Georgics, IV, 64. 

13-4-3. " Spit a Mexican." That is, impale a Mexican soldier; 
— the Mexicans being the most recent military enemies of Amer- 
icans. 

134:-32. Not with cranes. See note to page 77, 1. 4. Thoreau 
changes the allusion to the Trojan war, apparently because of 
the long and obstinate character of the struggle. 

135-4. A Pythagorean. The allusion is to a story of Pythagoras, 
the ancient pliilosopher, to the effect that he advised his disciples 
to abstain from beans, meaning thereby to abstain from politics, 
because beans were used by the Greeks in voting. 

135-13. Evelyn. See note to page 9. 

135-35. Sir Keneim Digby (1603-1665) was a man of varied 
occupations, among them that of an amateur scientist. His 
treatise Concerning the Vegetation of Plants (1661) is said to have 
been the first to notice the importance of vital air or oxygen to 
plants. It was later published together with an earlier essay of 
his "Of Bodies." 

135-40. Patrem familias, etc. "The master of a family should 
be a seller, not a buyer;" quoted from Cato's work on agriculture 
(see note to p. 54), chapter 2. 

138-5. Ceres, etc. On Ceres, see Classic Myths, p. 52. Plutus 
means Wealth, personified as a kind of deity, and Thoreau plays on 
the resemblance laetween tliis word and the name of Pluto, god of 
the underworld. (But the two names may be etymologically 
connected: see Classic Myt/is, p. 431.) 

138-11. Cato says. In the Preface of the work already met 
with. See pp. 54 and 71, and Notes. 

138-13. Varro. In a work called Reruni Rusticarum, written 
in the first century B.C. 

138-33. From spe, hope. These etymologies of Thoreau's must 
not be taken too seriously; this one was an ancient conjecture, which 
he probably found in Varro, but is doubtless a mistaken one, and 
the same is true of granum. 

140-37. Orpheus. This is an incident of the expedition of the 
Argonauts. 



278 NOTES. 

141-17. " As I sailed." Quoted from the ballad of Captain 
Kivld. This may be found in Our Familiar Songs, H. Holt <fc Co., 
18S1. 

14:3-4]. Put into jail. On this incident, see the Introduction, 
p. X. Thoreau discussed it further in his essay on "Civil Diso- 
bedience" (1849). "As I stood considering the walls of solid 
stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot 
thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not 
help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which 
treated me as if I were mere flesh and bones, to be locked up. 
I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was 
the liest use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail 
itself of my services in some way. ... It was like travelling into 
a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there 
for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town- 
clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we 
slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It 
was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, an»l 
our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights 
and castles passed before me. . . . When I came out of prison, — 
for some one interfered, and paid that tax, — I did not perceive 
that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he 
observed who went in a youth, and emerged a tottering and gray- 
headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene, 
— the town, and State, and country, — greater than any that mere 
time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which 
I hved. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived 
could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friend- 
ship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly 
propose to do right; that they were a distinct race from me by 
their prejudices and superstitions, as the Chinamen and Malays 
are; that, in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not 
even to their property; that, after all, they were not so nol)le but 
they treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a 
certain outward olD.?ervance and a few prayers, and by walking in 
a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to 
save their souls." 

143-9. Run " amok." This is a Malay word, meaning "rushing 
furiously into battle;" usually s]>elled amuck. 

143-38. " Nee bella fuerunt." From the elegies of Tibullus; 
I, X, 7. 

144-9. " Fresh woods," etc. From the last line of Milton's 
Lycidm^. 

144-27. Coenobites. Not a sect, but a general term for members 
of monastic orders; here, of course, a pun. 

149-36. Castalian Fountain. See Classic Myths, p. 418. 

153-34. Reticulatus means net-like in markings; guttatus, 
spott<>d. 

154-13. Fair Haven. See the map. 

156-3. Boom is here used in the sense of a pole set in water, or 
a barrier, to mark a channel or a boundary. 



NOTES. 279 

160-17. Moore of Moore Hall. The hero of the ballad of the 
Dragon of Wantley, found in Percy's Rcliques. It is interesting to 
compare Thoreau's protest against the intruding railroad with that 
of Wordsworth against the Windermere Railway. Addressing the 
mountauis of the Lake country, he said: 

"Heard ye that whistle? As her long-linked Train 
Swept onwards, did the vision cross your view? 
Yes, ye were startled; — and, in balance true, 
AVeighing the mischief with the promised gain, 
Mountains, and Vales, and Floods, I call on you 
To share the passion of a just disdain." 

But Thoreau's disdain must not be taken too seriously; and that 
he could feel the poetic and the humaner sides of the locomotive 
and of commerce we have already seen evidence (see pp. 96-102; 
" I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past 
me," etc.). 

164-1. Icarian Sea. A part of the ^Egean, named from the 
flight of Icarus. See Classic Myths, p. 2.56. 

16-4-7. My lake country. See the map. 

166-3. Kohinoor. One of the largest diamonds known, ac- 
quired by the British Crown in ISoO. 

166-32. Valhalla. The hall of Odin; see Classic Myths, p. 367. 

167-30. Benvenuto Cellini. .-Vii Italian artist and autobiogra- 
pher, 1500-1571. 

168-9. " Thy entry," etc. This, the quatrain that follows, and 
the lines on page 172, are from Ellery Channing's poem on Baker 
Farm (1S4S). F. B. Sanborn, in his note to the poem in his 
edition of Channing's book on Thoreau, says: "When this poem 
was written, the retreat here celebrated was a most retired spot, 
the outlands on Fairhaven Bay of James Baker's large farm in 
Lincoln, two miles southeast of Concord Village, and a mile or so 
from Thoreau's Cove and cabin ... It is now the frontage of 
C. F. Adams's villa" (1902). 

171-33. Remember thy Creator. Ecclesiastes 12 : 1. 

173-3. Talaria. The winged sandals of Mercury and other fleet 
divinities. 

175-9. " Yave not of the text," etc. That is, did not think the 
text worth a pulled hen. Chaucer's nun is a mistake for Chaucer's 
monk (in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales). 

175-22. Philanthropic. That is, loving mankind (as distin- 
guished from other Hving creatures). 

177-16. Kirby and Spence were authors of an Introduction to 
Entomology, published 1815-1826. 

179-2.5. The Ved. One of the Vedas; see note to p. 75. The 
Vedant (hne 30) is the writer. 

179-38. Thseng-tseu was a di.sciple of Confucius, born about 
505 B.C., who wrote two works on ethics. 

180-3. Not that food which entereth, etc. See Matthew 15 : 11, 

180-41. Mencius (otherwise Meng Tsze) was a Chinese philoso- 
pher who died about 289 B.C. In The Dial for October, 1843, 
Thoreau printed extracts from his writings foand in "the Chinese 



280 NOTES. 

Classical Work, commonly called the Four Books," translated by 
Rev. David Collie. 

181-23. Fauns and satyrs. Partly human, partly goat-like; see 
Classic Myths, pp. 77, 89. With the thought of this passage com- 
pare Tennyson's lines By an Evolutionist: 

" If my body come from brutes, tho' somewhat finer than their own, 
I am heir, and this my iiingdom. Shall the royal voice be mute? 
No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from the throne, 

Hold the sceptre, Human Soul, and rule thy province of the brute." 

181-26. " How happy's he," etc. From a poem by John Donne 
(1573-1631), To Sir Edward Herbert. 

181-31. " Those devils." See Mark 5 : 11-13. 

183. The Hindoo law-giver. Thoreau probably refers to the 
"Laws of Menu," reputed to be a son or grandson of Brahma. 
Extracts from this code were printed in The Dial for January, 1S43. 

183-21. A companion. Doubtless William EUery Channing, who 
lived in Concord, near Emerson, after 1841, and was one of Thoreau's 
few intimate friends. In his book on Tlioreau. the Poet-Naturalist, 
he recorded conversations remembered from their walks together, 
in the manner of tliis chapter of Thoreau's. 

185-8. Con-fut-see. One form of the original Chinese name 
of Confucius (the common form being Latinized, as in the case 
of Mencius). 

185-24. Pilpay & Co. That is, the writers of animal fables with 
moral significance; the "Fables of Pilpay (or Bidpai) '' came into 
Europe, through the Arabic, from the Sanskrit language. 

188-17. The name of the Greek warriors called Myrmidons was 
traditionally derived from myrnie.r, ant. See Classic Myths, p. 102. 

189-6. Patroclus. See Classic Myths, pp. 294-297.^ 

189-26. Austerlitz and Dresden were victories of Napoleon, the 
first, in 1805, the second in ISlo. Concord Fight occurred on the 
same day as the Battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775, Buttrick being 
one of the commanders of the Hevolutionary troops. 

190-18. The Hotel des Invalides is the national estabhshment of 
Fraiice for disabled solidcrs. 

190-27. Franv;ois Huber was a Swiss naturalist (1750-1831). 

190-28. .^neas Sylvius, otherwise Pius II, was Pope from 1458- 
1464. 

190-32. Eugenius IV was Pope from 1431-1447. 

190-36. Olaus Magnus was a Swedish historian (1490-1558). 

190-40. Christiern II was king of Denmark and Norway from 
1513-1523. 

191-2. The Fugitive Slave Bill was passed in 1850. 

191-13. Jerbilla. A diminutive form of the more common 
jerboa. 

192-5. His horse. Pegasus, of course; see Classic Myths, 
p. 233. 

196-22. Ceres or Minerva. See Classic Myths, pp. 52, 56. 

197-3!». A poet, l^llcry Channing again. 

198-40. Cato. In De Agri Cultura, chapter 3. 



NOTES. 281 

199-17. Prostrate Saturn. See Classic Myths, pp. 52, 56. 

201-22. Unio fluviatilis. The river-mussel. 

204-5, 6. Vulcan, the god of fire. Terminus of boundaries. 

204-29. Gilpin. William Gilpin published a work called Remarks 
on Forest Scenery in 17i)l. He was the author of many volumes 
on scenery. See note to p. 233. 

205-16. Michaux. Author of a work on the forest trees of the 
United States, which was translated from the French 1817-1S19. 

205-31. Goody Blake and Harry Gill. See Wordsworth's poem 
so entitled. 

206-30. " Light-winged Smoke," etc. This little poem, com- 
plete in ten lines, is considered to be one of Thoreau's best pieces 
of verse; it was first printed in The Dial for April, 1843. 

208-15. The verses are from a poem, " The Wood-Fire," by Ellen 
H. Hooper, printed in The Dial, 1840. 

209-31. Cato Uticensis. That is, "of Utica;" Marcus Porcius 
Cato, 95-4(5 b.c. 

210-21. Scipio Africanus. Two Roman generals nanied Scipio 
were called "Africanus" because of military exploits in Africa. 

211-16. Gondibert. A long and wearisome epic poem, pub- 
lished 1651. 

211-21. Chalmers' collection. A collection, in many volumes, 
of the works of the most important, and many unimportant, 
English poets, published ISIO. 

211-23. Nervii. An ancient people of Gaul. Here, of course, 
a hardly defensil)le pun. 

214-31. " Fate, free-will," etc. From Paradise Lost, II, 560. 

214-1. Bowl broken at the fountain. Misquoted from Eccle- 
siastes 12 : 6. 

217-23. Turned to it the other. See Matthew 5 : 39. 

218-3. A long-headed farmer. Probably Edmund Plosmer; see 
note to page 38. 

218-16. A poet. Doubtless C'hanning again. 

218-36. Last of the philosophers. Amos Bronson Alcott, who 
founded the Concord "School of Philosophy"; born at Wolcott, 
Conn., (1799-1888). 

219-10. Old Mortality. A character in Scott's novel of the same 
name. 

220-13. One other. Doubtless Emerson. 

220-18. The Vishnu Purana is the most famous of the eighteen 
"Puranas" of India. — Poems in which are told the legendary 
histories of the Hindoo gods. It was englished by H. H. Wilson 
in 1840. 

220-23. Did not see the man approaching from the town. 
Quoted from the old ballad of the Babes in the Wood. 

221-21. Lingua vernacula. The natural language of the place. 

225-23. Actaeon. See Classic Myths, p. 145. 

229-5. Lepus, levipes. Another fanciful etymology. 

231-25. The Styx. See Classic Myths, p. 78. 

232-27. A " fifty-six." That is, a weight of that number of 
pounds. Cf. Hawthorne, in The House of the Seven Gables (chap. 



282 NOTES. 

viii): "The modern Judge Pyneheon, if weighed m tne same' 
balance with his ancestor, would have required at least an old- 
fashioned fifty-six to keep the scale in equilibrio." This was half 
a "hundredweight" (112 pounds). 

233-17. William Gilpin. See note to page 204. The quotation 
is from Gilpin's Obi^ervaiinns on the Highlands of Scotland, ISOO. 

333-26. " So high as heaved," etc. Quoted from Paradise Lost, 
vii, 2S8-290. 

239-25. Tartarus. See Classic Myths, pp. 39, 41. 

24rl-.3."J. Bhagvat Geeta. See note to p. 49. 

241-40. Brahma and Vishnu and Indra form the triad or trinity 
of the Hindoo mythology. 

242-6. Atlantis and the Hesperides. See Classic Myths, pp. 73, 
82. 

242-7. The periplus of Hanno. On Hanno see note to p. 18. 
His voyage was called periplus, that is, circumnavigation. Ternate 
and Tidore are East Indian islands of the Molucca group. 

248-20. Labor, lapsus, etc. These etymologies, again, are 
imaginative rather than historical. So with labium, on the follow- 
ing page. 

249-39. ChampoUion was a French Orientalist, who in 1822 
discovered the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. 

250-5. Has some bowels. Thoreau plays on the old use of the 
word in the sense of compassion. 

250-32. Thor. See Classic Myths, p. 369. 

251-3. Weeds. A play on the old word weeds, meaning clothing; 
preserved longest in connection with mourning, as " widow's weeds." 

251-37. " Et primus oritur," etc. "And first the grass springs 
up, called forth by the early rains." From Varro's Rerum Rusti- 
carum, II, 2. 

253-6. I mean he; I mean the twig. That is, the very indi- 
vidual robin; the particular twig. One is reminded of Words- 
worth's lines: 

" But thcre'.s a tree, of many, one, 
A single field which I have looked upon, 
Both of them speak of something that is gone." 

254-12. " Eurus ad^ Auroram," etc. From Ovid's Metamor- 
phoses, I, 61, 62; the lines that follow are from the same passage, 
78-81. 

254-29. While such a sun holds out to burn, etc. Altered from 
a hymn by Isaac Watts. 



' While the lamp holds out to burn, 
The vilest sinner may return." 



255-8. Tb3 joy of his Lord. See Matthew 2.5 : 21. 
254-31. "The Golden Age," etc. From the Metamorphoses, I, 
89-'. 16, 107-108. 

256 lo. Death, etc. See 1 Corinthians 15 : 55. 

257-.36. Compassion is a very untenable ground. This whole 



i 



NOTES. 283 

passage is a fine exampie ot what has often been called Thoreau's 
stoicism. 

258-14. Calidasa was a poet of ancient India; his drama 
Sakuntala was translated by Sir William Jones in 1789. 

258-34. Terra del Fuego. Literally, the land of fire. 

259-5. Great-circle sailing. This, properly speaking, is follow- 
ing the curve of the earth so as to keep to the line of the shortest 
distance between two points; but Thoreau appears to mean merely 
sailing on the surface of the globe, as opposed to getting into the 
interior of things. 

259-21. Sir John Franklin was lost on an Arctic expedition in 
1847. Thirty-nine relief expeditions were sent out, traces of 
his tleath being found only in 1859. Grinnell was an American 
merchant who fitted out one of the relief ships, in 1850. Mungo 
Park was an African explorer, who died about 1806. Lewis and 
Clark explored the region from St. Louis to the mouth of the 
Columbia, 1804-1806. Frobisher was one of the earhest English 
explorers (died 1594). 

260-6. Erret, et extremes, etc., the closing Unes of Claudian's 
poem De Sene Veronensi. 

260-13. " Symmes' Hole." John Cleves Symmes, naval cap- 
tain in the war of 1812, advocated a theory that the earth and 
other planets are composed of hollow concentric spheres, open 
at the poles, and habitable on the inside. He petitioned Congress 
to fit out an expedition to the North Pole to test his theory, and 
published many pamphlets and one l)Ook, Theory of Concentric 
Spheres, 1826. See the Atlantic Monthly, April, 1873. 

260-30. Mirabeau was a Frenchman of the Revolution (1749- 
1791). 

262-8. Bright was formerly a common name for a horse. 

262-41. Kabir was a Hindoo religious reformer who lived at 
Benares between 1488 and 1512. 

265-39. " Lo, creation widens," etc. From Blanco White's 
once famous sonnet To Night, written about 1825. The octave runs: 

" IMysteriou.s Night! when our first parent knew 
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, 
Did he not tremble for this lively frame. 
This glorious canopy of light and blue? 
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, 
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus with the host of heaven came, 
And lo! creation widened in man's view." 

265-41. Croesus was a very rich king of Lydia (560 B.C.). 

266-26. The Mameluke bey. The Mamelukes were a military 
body which long exercised great power in Egypt; its officers were 
known as beys. In 1811 the Mamelukes were nearly exterminated 
by Mahomet Ali, who invited the order to court and then am- 
bushed and massacred them. The bey, referred to in the text, 
is, perhaps, the one who is said to have escaped by forcing his horse 
to leap from the parapet. 



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